The text for today’s episode is Conversations with Kiese Laymon, which is a new anthology of interviews with Laymon. My guests are Laymon himself, , a previous guest on the podcast and one of the best nonfiction writers of my generation, and the editor of the book, Constance Bailey.
Laymon’s memoir Heavy, which came out in 2018, was #60 on the New York Times list of the best hundred books of the 21st Century, and that really understates its brilliance. It’s a pretty amazing book, which you should read. He is also the author of the novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has a new children’s book out this year, City Summer, Country Summer, and is scheduled to have another memoir out next year, which is provisionally titled Good God.
Constance Bailey is an assistant professor of African American literature and folklore at Georgia State University and, like Laymon, a native of Mississippi, though neither of them lives there now. Bailey’s in Atlanta and Laymon, who did go back home for a number of years to teach at Old Miss, is now in Houston, where he has an endowed chair of English and creative writing at Rice University.
We talk about the origins of the book, both in terms of how Bailey sold it, as a new installment in part of the University of Mississippi Press’s storied “Literary Conversation” series, and why it was so appealing for Laymon to sign on (the series, as we learn in the conversation, was a meaningful influence on his development and self-conception as a young writer).
We talk a lot about Mississippi itself and how it’s affected both of their lives and writing. We talk about race, money, writing, speaking, and what it means to perform for white dollars. It’s a good conversation—such a good conversation, in fact, that if anyone ever plans to do another collection of interviews with Kiese, they should let me know and I will send them the transcript of this conversation and give them permission to include it in their collection.
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