“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of Free Music Archive

Elizabeth James-Perry: In spite of the fact that we're living in the 21st century, and we're so technologically advanced, I think humans are, and will always be, social creatures. And I think we'll always crave things that don't strictly serve a purpose, but that are also engaging and intriguing and interesting on a different level, other than its strict usefulness. And so I think that there's always going to be arts and culture. I think it varies a bit, in terms of practice and ease, and I think that whether you come to it when you're older, or you just grow up with it as a constant in your life, I think that being able to gather together and share knowledge, share artistic practices, make beautiful, unique things that relate to your culture, and then gift them in your tribal family and tribal community, or exchange with other tribes at various events, is really valuable.

Jo Reed: That is Wampum & Fiber Artist and 2023 National Heritage Fellow Elizabeth James-Perry. An award-winning and internationally known artist Elizabeth James-Perry is an enrolled member of the Wampanoag- Aquinnah Tribe in Massachusetts. And that affiliation with its history on the land and with the ocean informs all of her work. She creates her art-- wampum shell-carving and bead-making, porcupine quillwork, and twined textiles--using traditional tribal methods, hand tools and materials. Following years of research and gardening, she was able to successfully revive natural dye techniques using native plants she either grew or harvested sustainably herself. The result is artistic work of great beauty and deep significance which has been commissioned by museums both here in the US and abroad.  Holding a degree in Marine Science, Elizabeth worked for many years as a Senior Cultural Resource Specialist within the Aquinnah Tribal Historic Preservation.  She combines traditional tribal ecological knowledge, art, and science to create dazzling pieces of art and bring attention to sustainability and Native lifeways. Her long commitment to teaching and mentoring emphasizes artistic practices through traditional knowledge, connecting identity and sovereignty, maritime traditions and restorative Native gardening. I spoke with Elizabeth James-Perry soon after she was named a 2023 National Heritage Fellow—here’s our conversation.

Jo Reed: Well, Elizabeth, I want to begin by congratulating you at being named a 2023 National Heritage Fellow.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Thank you. It was quite an honor.

Jo Reed: You are a multimedia artist and you work with wampum and fiber and gardens and all your  work is tied to your Aquinnah homeland. So why don't we begin there and why don't you tell us about your traditional homeland, beginning with where it is.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Certainly. I'm enrolled with the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe and our tribal community is on Martha's Vineyard in what used to be called Gay Head but we've renamed it to our community name of Aquinnah. We live on the headland of the island, so it's in the southwest part on the high end at the cliffs. And it's a really scenic area with multicolored cliffs that are really unique in the world. There's no other place quite like it and so it's a really distinctive place to be. I grew up close to my homelands in Dartmouth, Massachusetts on the mainland, so I'm a few miles across the water and I can essentially look out towards the Elizabeth Islands from the beach here and I can see the smaller islands and through it-- through them, I can see Martha's Vineyard.

Jo Reed: Well given that location, there's a tradition of living with and harvesting the sea. And the sea is vital to your history, to your traditions. And how is it reflected in the art that you make?

Elizabeth James-Perry: You know, our ocean heritage, I think, is reflected in my art in that I was raised with a combination of family history and storytelling and whaling adventures and misadventures being related. You know, along with an introduction to the coastline and different places of significance and just very much at home in the beauty of the Atlantic Ocean. So the water is as much our homeland as the land is, if that makes sense. And it's a great inspiration to a lot of Native art on the coast. We use shells in our art in creating traditional beads of wampum. We use a lot of other marine resources as well and it's a big part of our daily sustenance in terms of our diet and life ways, too.

Jo Reed: And wampum are beads made from shells and the shell you tend to use is the quahog, which is a clam. Tell me about the unique aspects of quahogs and why they're ideal for wampum beads, or the ones that you make, anyway.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Yeah. So, yeah, traditionally, for time out of hand, wampum has been made from the quahog shell and I think that ties into a few different things. One is that it's a bivalve clam that's relatively abundant here on the coast in shallow waters. It grows to great age, which means it also grows to a good size and a good thickness, so it's a good thick serviceable material that's very durable. And so, because it's almost as hard as stone, you have to put a lot of work into shaping it; however, once you have, because it's such a sturdy material and it's not friable the way that, say, oyster shell might be, or breakable, the way oyster shell might be, quahog is worthwhile investing the time and creativity in to create beads, to create pendants and different designs to honor different aspects of creation or treaty agreements, histories, just creative pieces for everyday adornment as well. You know, artists have a good eye and I think that was true many thousands of years ago when folks were looking for materials to use in their expressive culture. And so, when you're looking for materials for your weaving, for your dyes, for your jewelry, for diplomatic use, wampum really fit the bill. The shell also has this beautiful purple region. It also has white regions or sort of off-white kind of cream, sometimes, rarely, a little bit yellowish regions as well and that duality in color means that you can create beads in the two different colors and make these high contrast designs that are very visible from a distance. And so if you're convening thousands of Native people for perhaps a celebration or a ceremony, perhaps a traditional ballgame, important council meetings, that is something visually that's going to be very striking and communicate very easily.

Jo Reed: And you use traditional methods when you're shaping the shell. Will you walk us through the processes that you use? You begin by gathering the clams themselves.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Sure. There's always going to be an aspect that's traditional even if you're using modern tools. I think partly because it's a living animal and the shell doesn't just jump out at you, you have to go and find it. And so the first step is actually knowing the environment, knowing where the water is clean enough to go and dig the clams and being selective in that, you know, the small ones aren't really going to afford you the ability to create a good thick-walled really strong bead. So you kind of have to be selective in the size of shells that you're using. So I use what they call the bulls. <laughs> So the quahog that you eat out of those shells is not tender. It's the kind that you want to chop up and definitely put in a chowder or maybe cook up in some clam fritters. And so then, you have a look at your shells. You decide if some are thick enough to really support good, thick, old-style disk beads. You put those aside. Then you've got to be thinking about your patterning in the piece that you're creating. So if I'm creating a belt of a certain size, I have a rough idea in my head, "Oh, I want it, you know, I want so many rows because I need the space to be able to realize the patterns that I need. I need it to be X long." So I'm looking at making at least 350 beads, if not more, even though I might not use all of them, because some of those beads might be too small, some might break in the actual manufacture, some of them, the color might be off. So there's a lot of selectivity in the artistic process that has to happen too, to realize a really nice piece. Each piece is really unique because each shell is really unique and the patterning is really unique. And it keeps it from getting too repetitive or too boring.

Jo Reed: How do you work with the shells to shape them into beads?

Elizabeth James-Perry: So when you have the shells, if you're doing it the traditional way, you use a stone saw. You know, my brother is a really good flint napper. I'm not a toolmaker. What I'll do is I'll go in certain areas like the Connecticut River Valley has beautiful, you know, chunks of sandstone that have been polished by the river for countless, you know,  hundred thousands of years, and so there's naturally-shaped pieces that are just great working surfaces. There are great narrow pieces that are almost like a natural file, because it's a long, slender piece and it's already abrasive because it's sandstone. And you know, you can use other stones as well. You can use local granite that's been polished on the coast as a work surface. So basically, you're taking that shell and you want to remove the rough back and you have to abrade it off. So you have to decide if you're going to use, like, sandstone and water and a lot of elbow grease <laughs> to grind that down so that the back is off and you simply have the workable sturdy part of the shell and it's not rough anymore and liable to scrape you. Or you can take some sand, even sand of different texture, if you want to get down to it works really well. So you might have some coarse sand to begin with and finer sand or sand you crush down on purpose at the end. And you want to add water because the water is just going to make those tools work better. Your tools will last a lot longer and they won't wear out as quickly. And likewise, and they'll work faster. It's also going to have the added benefit of keeping that dust down because if you want to make hundreds of beads, you know, my ancestors worked outside on projects like that, so that's summertime work, you know, when it's nice and comfortable outside, or maybe spring and fall as well. And then, of course, wintertime is a wonderful time for doing a lot of the spinning, dying, weaving of wampum into belts, although that was flexible as far as need or ceremony or maybe a council was happening. So in our traditional ways, back in the day, the women had the responsibility of encircling the council and memorizing all of what was said and all of what was agreed upon and then going back and weaving that into belt form to record it and they were responsible also for sharing that throughout their extended clans or families. And so that's a lot of responsibility. There's also, of course, women who are in council as leaders and things like that, too. So there's a pretty strong association I think in some ways with women and wampum. It's a really time-consuming art and by no means do just women make wampum beads. I think men and women both made wampum beads and in the historic period, of course, that got changed and kind of caught up in colonial ideas about taking over and using wampum as money and paying other tribes, you know, as well with our wampum too, so kind of intensifying production and making it dangerous is think to keep belts and to keep even woven wampum that was not necessarily strictly ceremonial or governmental but also personal family heirlooms and adornment. You know, your grandmother's beautiful collar that she left you or something like that. People were robbed and sometimes killed, you know, for their wampum. It's kind of a sad history, but I think it's important to understand that we still have those traditions now, so at any point people decide that they want to spend a lot of time working on wampum and reviving those traditions and the associated observances, I think that that's a possibility. We're still here in our homelands and we still have an ocean.

Jo Reed:  I'm curious what drew you to create wampum, art with wampum and to do it using traditional methods. Was this something that you came to as an adult? In your childhood home, was that kind of traditional creativity happening when you were growing up?

Elizabeth James-Perry: Boy, that's an interesting question. It's very analytical, <laughs> in a way that, you know, there's definitely choices that artists make, right, about their career path that they're going to follow. And probably the things that are important to us as artists don't, you know, figure in the public's radar at all and probably what's important to the public-- it's not central to Native artists' decision making and our ways of teaching in our families and stuff. I think, so the central things that I feel guided me when I was growing up here in Massachusetts was the importance of being connected to tribal homelands and either staying in the tribal homelands or staying near them or visiting often. So I have family members who did, you know, all of the above. And I, you know, come out of people who traveled the world in the whaling days. Folks were also in the Navy and, you know, they were merchants and things like that, also traveling the sea. But there always was just such a strong sense of home and community and staying connected.  So the importance of homeland and this region and nature in shaping sensibilities, tastes, the way the light is different times of year, because we have these wonderful seasons in New England and you know, something so beautiful about that cold winter light, you know, in the wintertime on a beach, on the dunes and on the grasses. And there's so many really fond associations, I think, of coastal living. You know, it's coveted. It's restorative and it's beautiful for your spirit. There's something about the ocean that's really mysterious in that way and you know, quite comforting and really valuable in ways it's hard to articulate. You know, maybe as a tribal person, that was emphasized more so. It was  "This is central to your identity. We enjoy visiting family. It's important to stay in touch. It's important to be connected to your roots."

Jo Reed: What about in your home—Do you grow up art being created around you? Were you encouraged to take up art?

Elizabeth James-Perry: And then I was sort of free range allowed to kind of explore whatever arts I wanted to, you know, but inspired, I think, by what I was seeing in my house, you know. So I grew up with, you know, my mom, Patricia Perry, who is a member of the James family from Martha's Vineyard, and she somehow when my brother and I were very little, she was practicing scrimshaw and she'd also do illustrations. She also liked clay very much. So she was quite talented and very modest. And I don't think she ever gives herself credit for shaping me and Jonathan's aesthetics at all, but, you know, it was very central. And so I think she didn't grab wampum and say, "Here. You need to work with that. Here, I'm going to show you how to do everything with wampum." She had an appreciation broadly for Native arts and had grown up when more so bead work was very popular. And she was very interested in scrimshaw and that's what she pursued and she continues it to this day. I was never told, you know, "Oh, go into weaving. Go into basketry. You should do natural dye work. You should do wampum." I watched her work and I participated in some of her art to the degree that I really got comfortable with natural materials and textures. I also had a more realistic sense, although I had to really work to embody an appreciation of that, that things made with the hands take time. You know, it's not about instant gratification. It's not like picking up a coloring book and filling it in or something like that. There's a depth, there's a selectivity that you can only get from experience. You can have teachers and mentors. Maybe you can do research. But how well you do is really kind of governed by how much time you're willing and able to put into your particular craft. Wampum resonated with me and I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully express why. It just, it was very striking. It was rare. It was very beautiful. It has a unique texture an appearance. Purple is not the most common color in nature in terms of materials to carve and yeah, I mean, it captured me and then I think I really went in-depth and got much more technologically adept and sophisticated when I decided to focus on 17th century history and diplomacy and I started to really look at and read about wampum. And it just seemed like the more that I knew, the more I realized there was more out there to learn and it was just so deep and rich and so full of cultural heritage that I essentially became hooked. And that would be, that was probably around 20 years ago. You know, an artist is drawn to I think a certain appearance, I guess, or aesthetic in their art that they want to express. And, you know, for me, I think the three-dimensionality of what you can do with wampum, what was done historically, let's say, and even, I guess I'm going to use that controversial term "prehistorically," in ancient times with wampum, there's a wonderful three-dimensionality. There's a preservation of the shape of shell and the thickness of shell and the substantial qualities of quahog that make it so striking that really appeal to me and if you have a sensibility, if you're a creative person and you don't want to do the same thing over and over again super quickly, just to be efficient about it and move on, and you just really get off on the process, artists can be very tactile and there's something about really being hands-on, really holding the shell, knowing the weights of the shell, which is quite striking, looking at the variation in the layering of the color that's this living being created over time and cutting through those gradually and exposing and exploring gradually, there's something about a relationship that you can really explore fully if you give yourself time. And I think what machines can do if you're not very, very careful in your relationship to machines and computers, is they can speed everything up and that efficiency can be pretty seductive. But I think that efficiency can also strip away depth and feeling and experiences that otherwise you might take the time to have and to learn from and hold with you.

Jo Reed: Elizabeth, you're also a marine biologist. How does that work mesh with and inform you work as an artist?

Elizabeth James-Perry: So Marine science really resonated because I think tribal folks are still so interconnected with and interdependent with the Atlantic Ocean and it's such a vital force in the Northeast. I think we have a front row seat, seeing how fish are doing, whether or not they're thriving or whether they're suffering. Whether shell fish are thriving or suffering. We've seen, you know, obviously, the decline of the whales with the commercial whaling industry and then to some degree, I think, their return. The Marine Mammal Protection Act and the return of now of some seals to this region, it's pretty remarkable. And so I think the tribal mores of responsible stewardship, staying in connection with the resource, looking at what's going on and really modifying interactions, not overharvesting. Those are really key parts of longevity of tribes in their homelands. That's why we can park in an area for tens of thousands of years, and life will continue just fine. There might be some changes in adaptations as climate changes, but we tend to continue in spite of all of that, and in spite of colonization, as well. It just gives you a different kind of time frame, and the ability to plan for the future, and think about how your actions impact the resources. You know, observation is also a key part of science: long-term commitment to monitoring, seeing what's there, versus what would be easy to assume. There's a difference between knowing and assuming, and I think science gives you that opportunity to observe and record what's going on, and to make recommendations based on what's going on in a way that is most helpful to the resource, essentially. And that is also, although it's articulated in a different way, a really key tenet of Native land stewardship and ocean stewardship, as well. So I find the two are highly compatible, for my purposes.

Jo Reed: You're also a fiber artist, working with a variety of natural material, and I'd love to have you talk about that work, because you've been credited with the recovery of this lost art. So, talk about the recovery of the processes of making your fiber work.

Elizabeth James-Perry:  You know, I think things become lost because lifestyles change, and people make certain decisions, or have to make certain decisions. I think that, in terms of the fiber arts, there were still folks in tribal communities on Martha's Vineyard, although it wasn't common, still hand-processing Indian hemp and milkweed for cordage, and then doing weaving for our own communities, for our own use, because it was valuable, and it was handed down, mother to daughter. And they were treasured pieces. And then gradually, as more folks became disenfranchised and perhaps had to move, or had to move to cities to get jobs year round, or get educations, or maybe there was world war, and so they went overseas, there was a lot of disruption. And then there was also sort of this quick change-around to a very different lifestyle, where there weren't mainly households using a lot of handmade things, whether they made it or bought it, but plastic material cultural became just ubiquitous. And it was quick, and it was very inexpensive, and... a lot wasn't being supported, because you could just get these things cheaply. Why would you support artists making these things by hand? Why would you restore the environment to make sure that artists still had natural materials to work with? So, there were increasingly challenges, I think, to pursuing those. But my-- you know, my great-grandmother's generation still practiced those arts, and things like that, to some degree.

Jo Reed: How did you learn fiber art—who taught you?

Elizabeth James-Perry:  I grew up with cousins who were older generation. Their mothers were older. My weaving teacher, Helen Adequan [ph?], her mom, also named Helen, she was born in the late 1800s, around folks who were still doing a lot of those things, and she was a really great basket weaver. Her daughter was a really good basket weaver. They knew how to make mats, which was a form-- for some reason, that Tudi [ph?] form really fascinated me, visually and texturally. And so I got a lot of guidance from them, from-- pardon me, from Helen Adequan, not from her mother. I remember her, but she died when I was young.

Jo Reed: What do you remember about their teaching—what stood out for you

Elizabeth James-Perry:  They were uncompromising, so I don't think that they were just turning out tons of baskets, but the ones that they made were creative and beautiful, and the materials were really carefully prepared in such a way that, decades and decades later, the baskets were still in amazing condition. And someone had taken the time in the twining process to twine a little chevron -- a horizontal chevron design-- that was really subtle. So, really, if you were a weaver, and you took a good look, you'd really appreciate the pattern and the extra work. But the casual observer, even who had it in their house for decades, really didn't have a clue. So it was obviously art that was being preserved by the maker, for the maker, and not necessarily seen or appreciated or valued by the general public, or even sometimes the tribal public. So I think that they were folks that were doing what resonated with them, what was important to them, even though there wasn't necessarily a lot of societal rewards <laughs> for doing so. I think that that informed what I was doing, you know? And I think that, at times, I've been able to make it a more social kind of undertaking, when I've gone to powwows with my weaving, and then folks come around from the tribal community, from the broader region, and say, "Hey, that's a beautiful finger-weaving. Can you teach me how to do that stitch? I'd like to go make myself a sash." Or, "How are you doing this twining? I don't get how you're floating this design," or whatever it is. And the kind of social aspect really kind of keeps it sustainable, and what my cousins did was they would come to my mom's house, and the family would get together. We would eat. They would be beading and talking, weaving and chatting, and sharing news, and maybe strategizing, and helping family members who were in need, and whatever-- essentially, these family members just rolled up their sleeves and did whatever they had to, but they were often also doing artwork while they were figuring out life. And so that was a big part of my growing up, and I didn't grow up with a sense that you had to put art aside in order to live well, or to have a community, or any of those things, and so I don't have a strong sense of separation between those things.

Jo Reed: You also self-source your materials as much as possible. Why is that important to your work?

Elizabeth James-Perry: Right. So, I grew up outside a lot, maybe in part because <laughs> my generation, parents used to throw their kids out and lock the door. <laughs> I remember my mother doing that. I don't really see anybody do that with their kids now, at all, which is amazing to me. I don't quite get it.  

Jo Reed: That happened to me, too, when I was a kid. It was, "Out, you. Out." I loved it!

<both laugh>

Elizabeth James-Perry: Yeah. Right. But it was great, because you get this year-round just exposure to the outdoors and all the amazingness out there, and you get great exercise. You really develop your lungs, and you play with the other kids, and you figure out life for yourself. Nobody's just doing stuff for you. You're not coddled.  And hopefully, you don't get stung or bitten by anything in the process, right? <laughs> That's what our parents were all hoping. Like, "Oh, I hope she survives, but this'll be good for her." And  if you think about it, and you hold onto those experiences, you also kind of don't want to give it up. So... <laughs> when I was graduating from college, and I think there was this huge fascination with these eight-hour-plus desk jobs, that never appealed to me at all. I really did not see how anybody did it. I can't sit still that long, wouldn't want to, don't think it's healthy. And so I really loved, in the sciences, you could do field biology and be outdoors all day. You could get up at dawn or earlier. You could be on the water all day. You could travel all over the place, or you needed to travel all over the place. So all of that variety outside really appealed to me, and I loved seeing the birds, and hearing them, and watching the fish, and identifying things, and understanding everything's role, and being part of that. When you source your materials, you have to know where things are on the land, and you have to be really resourceful, because so much of land has been developed. There has to be a certain amount of traveling, monitoring areas, identifying new areas to gather materials, because you don't want to gather out one specific site, or something, and then you can build into it some reciprocity, where you're replanting what you're harvesting. If you're harvesting something and you've got seeds on it, you pull the seeds off, and you leave them in that place. You might decide, if something's really rare, you're not going to go in and pack that. You're going to actually grow it on your property, and then use it in a really sparing way, so you're helping the abundance of that particular species, and maybe raising some awareness, which I think is really important. The species diversity here in New England isn't anything like it was, and it does put pressure on the artist to figure out solutions, whether it's growing what you need or encouraging different organizations to restore certain habitats and environments so that tribal people can have agreements to do a little bit of selective harvesting, and kind of keep that processing knowledge and artistic knowledge alive. There's just a lot of challenges. I enjoy it. I like a challenge anyway, I suppose.

Jo Reed: And you harvest and work with natural dyes…and you revived natural dye techniques. Why led you to do this

Elizabeth James-Perry:  I really pursued reviving natural dyes because, as a weaver, I was working with commercial fibers, early in my career, that were commercially dyed. And in one particular project, I started to cough every day, at the end of the day. And... I had some skin irritation, as well, and it really forced me to look at what I was weaving with, and what I was exposing myself to, and what commercial dyes are made of, what happens to the environment if there are spills, and they're released into rivers, and all the fish die. And I'm also living in a part of the state where there is a pretty high cancer rate. So it raises your awareness about the costs. We've got super-speedy, supposedly inexpensive ways in the modern world to produce, produce, produce-- overproduce, in my opinion-- and use and waste, and so thank goodness there is a little bit more of a thoughtful consumptive practice that's emerging, where people hold onto things and really get a lot of use out of them, and then recycle them, instead of just filling landfills with stuff, and exploiting the earth further. I think I had to reckon with what it is to grow things in abundance enough that you can actually make something; that it's not a hobby, and you're not just trying something out, but you have enough dye to rely on for that particular season that's going to carry you through a bunch of projects. You're going to have enough to share, so if a quill worker would like some of your natural-dyed quills, you can produce them and share them. You know, when I had my weaving apprentices here, we'd always take the time to take the yarn, skein it up. I'd show them the dye process, and we'd even do things like enjoy a day at the beach, harvesting some seaweeds,  you know, early in the season, when they're nice and fresh, and then bringing them back here, and then just seeing what colors we could get, if they enhanced the take-up of other colors, and things like that, by being additive, et cetera. And so it gives you a deeper appreciation of the lands you're on, when you also know the properties of the plants and how they interact, and what you can make. It's very inspiring, I think.

Jo Reed: Well, you've said the traditional arts are imbued by cultural, ecological knowledge, and this seems to me an example of that.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Mm-hmm, yes.

Jo Reed: Well, one project I really would love to have you discuss is Raven Reshapes Boston: A Native Corn Garden at the MFA. And that’s the Museum of Fine Arts Can you describe that, and what inspired it?

Elizabeth James-Perry: Yes, definitely. And so, Raven Reshapes Boston was a large horseshoe-crab-shaped garden that was mounded up. Our gardening involves mounding as an adaptation. It's sort of like a raised bed that heats up a little bit quicker, and then your plants develop a little bit earlier, so you kind of lengthen the growing season here in New England, which is temperate. The garden was a Three Sisters garden, and it was edged with some indigenous sedge grasses. So, basically, an emphasis on plants that are really important to Native cuisine, and some of them are important for things like weaving basketry and thing like that. They're also really important parts of the environment, in terms of habitat. These sedge grasses are so valuable in so many different ways. And the overall garden was surrounded by tons of quahog shell from my workshop here-- over a ton-- to kind of make the design emerge and connect, really explicitly, the garden to the ocean and ocean life, and emphasize Boston's connection to the coast, which I think doesn't get visually acknowledged much in Boston at all. And so <laughs> its position there, at the MFA, had to do with the MFA reaching out during a time when folks were protesting. The Black Lives Matter movement was full swing. Terrible, tragic things had been happening. People were speaking up, people were marching, and also, people were just trying to educate. And so I think institutions had to reflect on whether they really were being inclusive or not, whether they were engaging with BIPOC artists in the region, et cetera, et cetera. And at the MFA, of course, you have that problematic Dallin statue, which is a white guy's, white artist's, depiction of a sort of composite Native person, indeterminant origin, wearing stuff from several different tribal communities, but not much, on a horse, reaching up to the sky in a manner that might be construed as a bit helpless. So, obviously, not necessarily a beloved image for our Native people in this region. As far as a representation of Native people, it's not accurate to the Northeast Woodlands at all.

Jo Reed: And for people who might not know, that is a statue by Cyrus Dallin called “Appeal to the Great Spirit” which sits in front of the museum’s entrance

 

Elizabeth James-Perry: It's the first thing you see when you go to the museum, and it's kind of irksome, to say it politely. And so I think my positioning the garden was kind of like a horseshoe crab eating the statue. It was kind of positioned over and moving beyond it. And... you know, the corn was surrounding it. The corn pollinated beautifully. There were corn ears on all the stalks. The corn matured. The corn dried. We harvested the corn. I've got some nice pictures. What I really liked about it was, I would go there sometimes, just unannounced, and just see people walking by, appreciating the garden or experiencing the garden, and see families taking pictures of themselves near the plants, and looking at the plants. And I really wanted something that was reflective of Native culture and values, and environmental values, and an alternative <laughs> to the statue that was more authentic, and that people could freely experience, who were walking, driving by, see from the train, see when they were going to the museum, and that would just make them ask questions. You know, maybe pause and read a sign, maybe talk to Native people, maybe learn more about Native folks in this region.

Jo Reed: Teaching is very important to you, and you do a great deal of mentoring around plant knowledge and sustainability, natural resource protection, and this all interacts with the art that you create and you teach. So, what is it that you want to impart to students?

Elizabeth James-Perry: You know, I think I like to encourage students' creativity and their willingness to find out what's interesting to them, and to explore that, and to find ways to connect with the resources, understand more about the environment that they're in, whether it's local or whether it's knowledge they're taking home to their other tribal communities across the nation. I think that there is beautiful sophistication to our traditional ecological knowledge that goes into practice of arts. And the more of an understanding that you can cultivate about the environment, the more you can help the environment and enrich it, the more there's resources for other artists to practice traditional arts, should they choose, or incorporate it in some way, whether it's obvious or kind of more buried in their art form, in their expressive practice. I want the option to be there. I want the knowledge to be there. I, in no way, <laughs> want to oblige folks in tribal communities to have to practice Native Art-- capital N, capital A-- on a daily basis, because it must be done. I'm not rigid like that, and I would never expect that. And I think, though, if you grow up around it, if you have it in your house, if you hear people talk about it, if you see some people practicing it, it's a choice. I'm not really someone who subscribes to this sort of "vanishing Indian" trope, and "vanishing Indian" knowledge, and "vanishing Indian" arts. I don't really like it. I don't think it's accurate. I don't think it's how life is. I think, if you work to kind of build a pretty strong foundation, people can come in and out. They might be very dedicated to a certain traditional art for a certain phase, but then maybe they start a family. They've got a lot of competing interests, some obligations at home or something, or they're pursuing a career elsewhere. I don't ever-- you know, I don't really believe in penalizing folks for leaving tribal communities to get a decent job or pursue something, because I think you can always stay in touch. You can always come home and visit. You could always pick up a basket and take it with you, that reminds you of home, and I think that  it's important to feel comfortable.  I think if we impose a lot of rigid guidelines and expectations on what it is to be an artist, and what it is to be a tribal community member in the 21st century, I think, more than anyone else's negative treatment of tribes, I think that would doom us. But I think if we love each other, and take care of each other and the earth, we will always have the choice as to if we want to practice this or that art, or if we want to go to celebrations, or comfortable dancing at powwows and teaching the next generation. We just want to watch, we just want to take a break for a few years, we just want to come back, that's normal and comfortable and natural, and I'm in no way paranoid about this epic loss. <laughs>

<dog collar jingles>

Jo Reed: I hear the dog getting restless so it must be time for us to end—(both laugh)

So, finally, Elizabeth, you're a 2023 National Heritage Fellow. What does this award mean to you, and mean for the work that you're doing?

Elizabeth James-Perry: The award was an amazing honor, and it was pretty humbling, and it was also just super encouraging. It was encouraging for me, personally, but it was encouraging. I think it was encouraging because, in the Northeast, I feel, actually, like a lot of our arts haven't gotten a lot of attention. In spite of the practice of fiber arts, in spite of wampum artists, in spite of folks who've really delved into archery traditions and things like that, I really still feel like there's just very low visibility. As you drive around New England, you'd never know we were here, in a lot of ways, unless you know tribal people, if you're a tribal person, perhaps you know.  It's hard to articulate the extent of it, but I really think-- I believe in the ripple effect, and I do think that, in recognizing one person, I think, more explicitly, you're recognizing the arts from a particular region, and giving them more visibility, and raising their profile. And it's just another way of, I think, making those arts sustainable.    I think it feeds into the whole... encouraging arts at all levels. I think encouraging... not everybody, necessarily, to pursue it in a really strict way, and nothing else, but seeing the value. And so, whether you're practicing the art, or paying attention to the art, or perhaps writing about it, or reading about it avidly in your spare time, or having a collection in your house that you can really appreciate, and all of your visitors get to appreciate, as well, I think there is lots of ways to be involved and be supportive of art and culture, and lots of ways to be supportive of other arts. Yeah, I-- there's so much to be said. Oh, my gosh. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Well, let me just add my congratulations.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Thank you.

Jo Reed: And it's so well deserved. Your work is just beautiful and profound in many, many ways, on every level, so thank you.

Elizabeth James-Perry: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was Wampum & Fiber Artist and 2023 National Heritage Fellow Elizabeth James-Perry. You can find more about her and see examples of her brilliant work at arts.gov or on her website Elizabethjamesperry.com. We’ll have links to both in our show notes. And mark your calendars for September 29 when the 2023 National Heritage Fellows will receive their awards at the Library of Congress. Check out arts.gov for details as the date approaches.

You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works I’m Josephine Reed.  Nicole Chung has written two memoirs in the past five years. And both of them deal with loss and family. Her first book the critically acclaimed All You Can Ever Know explores the circumstances of her adoption as a Korean American growing up in a white family in a white community, the deep love she felt for and from them despite their refusal to recognize her racial difference as having any significance, and her subsequent successful search for her birth family as an adult. All You Can Ever Know went on to be named a best book of the year by over twenty outlets including NPR and The Washington Post and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Nicole Chung had little time to enjoy that success.  As her memoir A Living Remedy details, Nicole lost both her adoptive parents within two years of each other. A memoir that deftly navigates personal loss and broader societal issues, A Living Remedy deals with Nicole’s profound grief and her anger at a healthcare system that failed her father, her efforts to help her much-loved terminally ill mother who lived across the country and entered hospice as the country shut down due to the pandemic, and her struggle to balance the duties of mother and daughter. I spoke with Nicole Chung recently about  A Living Remedy but first wanted to touch briefly on her first memoir All You Can Ever Know beginning with the circumstances of her adoption and her decision to look for her birth parents

Nicole Chung:  So my first book, All You Can Ever Know was published in 2018And as you mentioned, it primarily deals with my growing up adopted in a white family.  And but it's much more focused on when I grew up and what happened when I decided to search for my Korean birth family, and what I discovered in that search which happened to coincide with my pregnancy and the birth of my own first child.  So it's also a book about expanding family in many, many different ways, you know, being in reunion with my birth family while my own family was growing.  And the circumstances of my adoption-- so I'm actually the only Korean adoptee I know who wasn't born in Korea.  My birth parents were immigrants to this country, so they came shortly before my birth, and I was born very prematurely in the Seattle area and adopted from there in the early eighties.  My adoption was a closed adoption, as many were back then, which means there was no contact or information exchanged between my birth and my adoptive families.  So I really knew nothing substantial about my birth family, and they were always a source of curiosity and like some confusion, if I'm honest, and a lot of big, tangled emotions as I got older.  And my adoptive parents had always told me, you know, it's your decision if you want to search when you're an adult.  They were very opposed to there being any contact between our families when I was a child.  But it's not like I started searching right when I turned 18.  The real final push for me after decades of curiosity was when I got pregnant with my first child, and I remember just like feeling as though I didn't have -- not only did I not have like medical or social history, like those hard facts that we often want.  I felt like there was something else that was missing, like part of my legacy, my family history. The intangible, unknowable things, the things you can only really learn if you get to talk with and get to know people and get to have those relationships that I never got to have with my birth family.  And I just remember feeling as though I have like another reason to search now, you know, I can search for both of us, and maybe if my birth family's willing to talk with me, I can at least learn more and have more of my history, our history, to pass on. 

Jo Reed:  You finally did meet your birth parents, and you met one of your siblings, Cindy, who has become a very, very important part of your life. 

Nicole Chung:  Yes.  My sister and I are still very close.  And so, you know, the part of All You Can Ever Know, not to give like too much away, but focuses on that reconnection, which I think has been really nourishing and really important for both of us.  And we've been in reunion now for over a decade, and she's still like a very big part of my life and part of my kids' lives.  So I'm really, really  grateful for that. 

Jo Reed:  You make it crystal clear in both your books -- nothing could be clearer -- that you were deeply loved by your parents, and you deeply loved them in return.  But they were told when they adopted you to take a colorblind approach to parenting, and you write very eloquently about what the implications of that were for you both inside your home and outside.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  My parents were really following the advice of, I mean I refer to them as "experts" kind of in quotes, but I think this was common guidance back then.  Everybody from the social worker to the adoption agency, to the judge that finalized my adoption told them, and just basically assimilate her into your family.  Like race is not really going to be relevant, you know, all that matters is that you love her.  And you know, they did obviously.  It was not a home that was in any way lacking in love or support.  But we weren't really equipped, they weren't really equipped, I don't think they were given the tools or the guidance that they really needed and, to their credit, asked for.  You know, my parents really did push to try to find out what they needed to know about raising a child of a different race than them. There was nothing, really no guidance given.  And so they thought they were doing the best thing by taking this quote/unquote colorblind approach to raising me.  But of course I didn't really acknowledge the reality, and it didn't really acknowledge what I was seeing and experiencing.  I was the only Korean that I really knew growing up in our small town, which was predominantly white, not always the only Asian kid, but  frequently.  It was often confusing, it was often isolating.  And, you know, as I write about a little in the book I experienced a lot of like racial bullying growing up that confused me because I'd been told my race didn't matter at home, and we never really talked about it.  It was this largely unacknowledged, undiscussed topic.  And yet when I went out into the world, like beyond the safety of my family's home, I encountered all these signs and evidence that actually it does matter, or did matter to many people, and had to kind of struggle to figure out how to deal with that and process that kind of on my own because I didn't have anybody else in my life who was like me.  So that was like I think the primary effect was it would've been kind of isolating anyway just growing up in racial isolation, but there was this added layer of I guess like emotional isolation when it came to really grappling with racism, and the reality of my identity and what that meant because I didn't really have any company, and I didn't have the vocabulary often to even explain what was going on.  So I think a lot of times my parents were unaware, like for example of the bullying, I was in my twenties before I told them about that.  So, yeah, I think none of us, neither my adoptive parents -- I mean nor my birth parents, nor I were especially well served by the adoption industry at that time that we were interacting with.

Jo Reed:   Now, let’s turn to your recent memoir A Living Remedy and the circumstances that led you to write it

Nicole Chung:  My adoptive father passed away in early 2018,which was the year actually that All You Can Ever Know was published.  So I go on book tour and I'm grieving, and in between events I'm like going home to see my mother and we're kind of processing our grief together.  And there was this aspect of our shared grief that we talked about a lot, and that kind of surprised me in its intensity, but we both felt a lot of unresolved anger and like some self-blame about not being able to help or save my father.  So as I write about in especially the first half of A Living Remedy, my father's death at 67 was really sped by years of financial precarity and a lack of access to the specialized healthcare that he needed.  He had serious illnesses that neither my mother nor I believed had to kill him at 67 but did because of years spent unable to get the treatment he needed, which is of course a very common story in this country.  We have one of the highest costs of healthcare in the world, and yet so many people go without the care they need, even insured people, but in the case of my parents, they were often uninsured for many years, as I was when I was growing up with them.  And so there was this aspect of our grief that we were really struggling to grapple with.  Like how much were we personally responsible for?  How much was he failed by structural failings, by systems beyond our control, you know, how do we reckon with that?  And especially given what we knew that it was in fact very common in this country.  And so I started thinking about writing this story, like the story of my grief and my mother's grief too, and how we try to care for each other despite these broken systems.  And then I had started working on the book, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and so she fought it off once and it came back, and it was terminal.  And at that point like everything changed. If it was even still possible to write this book --  and I didn't know that it was -- I would have to kind of take a big, long break and think about how.  And I was so focused on really trying to care for and support her from afar that I wasn't writing much at all.  And then the pandemic happened.  So my mother started hospice care in the same month as all the coronavirus lockdowns began.  And because of that I wasn't able to be as present in her final weeks as I wanted to be.  So the book was obviously something very different when I picked it up and started working on it again.  You know, I had never anticipated writing a book about the deaths of both my parents in a two-year span.  I never envisioned writing a book that would even touch briefly on this pandemic that changed all our lives.  And it was a real struggle. I think for many months writing was obviously not my priority or my focus.  It was probably six or seven months after my mother died that I even really thought about getting back into this, seeing if I could.  And eventually, I can't tell you when, because it was a long process, but in the midst of grief and in the midst of writing, like this sense of urgency that you feel when you're working on something that you feel is compelling, that is important to you, that you hope will be important to other people and matter to them, like that sense of urgency and almost like wonder and curiosity you feel when you're working on a project like that, I started to feel it again.  And I realized that at the heart of this book is really my relationship with my mother.  And so I rewrote it from the beginning. I think it just took on a lot more urgency and a lot more significance for me.  And I was writing it during the pandemic still at home, so I lived with this book day in, day out, in a way I haven't really done with any other writing project before. So it was a very long and obviously emotionally difficult process, but it required me to learn a new way of writing and to show myself more grace and more care in my work.  And honestly, I wouldn't say this is the reason I wrote it, but it's just a fact.  Like doing that active memory work, spending that time with all those memories and those moments that I was trying to capture in the book, it really summoned my parents in this way.  And I don't want to say it was without pain because it wasn't, but it was really meaningful to get to spend that time with them again in the writing of this book. 

Jo Reed:  You know, in the book you're not only delving into your own loss of your parents, you're also really looking at the way class operates in this country.  Your parents shielded you from sort of the precariousness of their financial lives as best they could.  But when you were in high school that was the first time your mom was diagnosed with cancer, and at least part of that financial truth was revealed to you. 

Nicole Chung:  Yes. This is one of the things I really wanted to write about in the book was part of our coming of age is starting to recognize where we're situated in the world.  Where our family is, what our circumstances are.  And we're often inferring these things based on what we observe as young people.  I don't think it's common for families to like sit down and say, “Okay, like these are the details of our financial situation.”   My parents were, I think, trying to protect me.  I think they also thought it was none of my business as their child.  Right?.  Something that held true even after I became an adult, sometimes they were really hesitant to let me in and to see exactly what their situation was.  But I was picking up, obviously, clues.  And that really started at earnest in high school when my mom got sick my freshman year.  So she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I mean she did beat it that time.  She went into remission, her breast cancer actually never came back.  It was another type of cancer that killed her many years later.  But the really the financial repercussions of that event, I mean it was just something my family never recovered from.  Again, facing that type of medical emergency as an uninsured or underinsured family in this country, it was really when their medical debt started to accumulate.  And then there were like often layoffs.  My father was actually laid off from his job like six weeks or so after my mother's breast cancer surgery.  And so it was really the start, whereas up till then I had thought things were stable, maybe they even were.  But as I write in A Living Remedy, it was a type of stability known to many people in this country, and it was dependent on everything going right for our family.  And when something went wrong, like when someone got sick, you know, I began to see how quickly things could fall apart.  So by my junior and senior year of high school, again, this was not really stated to me in so many words, but like we were all really struggling.  My parents were sort of trading periods of unemployment.  We'd all been without healthcare for many years.  I was working a part-time job like, you know, 15 to 20 hours a week in high school just to pay basic expenses of mine--everything from clothes to school lunches to like my college application fees.  I didn't know that I would probably have been exempt from a lot of these things, like no one told me.  So I just kind of kept working and kept going, which is what I'd learned from my parents.  But, you know, I knew something was off, I knew something was wrong.  I knew we didn't have enough, and eventually it occurred to me like I'm working in paying for things that I guess a lot of my peers' parents pay for them.  But I was also just doing what I thought had to be done and needed to be done.  And I was so focused on trying to be the first person in my family to go to college and escape this little white town that I'd grown up in.  I think I had kind of that selfish tunnel vision that you have at that age which was just like I need to like get out of here.  And so I wasn't really focused on like the particulars of their financial situation, our financial situation.  It was only years later when I found my first FAFSA, the free application for federal student aid, and like just saw how little we all made combined my senior year of high school.  And that was why my expected family contribution to college was zero, but at the time I really didn't know the particulars.  I just knew I got this scholarship, I'm going to college, you know, that's what's next for me.  So it was sort of a growing awareness that I think is common in a lot of young people of just like putting together clues but not really being told what's going on.

Jo Reed:  Well, you write in the book as an adult, when your father got sick, the guilt you felt not being able to help financially.  And you write "If you grow up, as I did, it happened to be very fortunate, as I was, your family might be able to sacrifice much so you can go to college.  You'll feel grateful for every subsequent opportunity you get.  But in this country, unless you attain an extraordinary wealth, you will be likely -- I'm sorry -- you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped.  You will learn to live with the specific hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind yet are unable to bring anyone else with them."  First of all, thank you for writing that.  I thought that was such a clear explanation of one of the ways class operates in the United States with its misplaced emphasis on individual achievement.   And the guilt you felt led you to question even your choosing writing as a career rather than one that would have been more lucrative. Talk about that guilt that you had that many people carry with them about their parents.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean, another thing I write in the book is that I was really raised with this bootstrapping myth.  I mean, I think my parents believed in it.  I think it's an insidious myth that we have in this country, that the idea of meritocracy, and if you work hard and work well like eventually you'll be able to take care of yourself and everybody that you care about.  I think that is an insidious, like a false promise that is made to many people.  And so all that time when I was like working and trying to think about college or what came after, like what's next, always is in the back of my mind was this idea I wasn't just doing it for myself. That was never the goal.  I was always thinking, it's going to be your job to take care of your family someday.  Like that's what it means to be the first person to go to college.  Like what is the point of all this hard work?  What is the point of achieving anything if you can't take care of the people you love?  I'm not trying to present myself as like some selfless person, but that was just what I thought.  I thought it was my responsibility.  But individuals -- and I didn't know this at the time, at 18 or 22 or 25 -- but, you know, I was never going to be able to fully compensate for what my parents were up against for the different parts of the safety net, not just the healthcare system that failed to catch them when they needed it.  So, I ended up becoming a writer, obviously, and I have had a career in publishing, I worked as an editor for many years.  And I didn't know really when I started these things, it wasn't necessarily thinking they were the most lucrative, but I didn't quite realize like what an entry or even mid-career publishing salary would be or how far it would or would not stretch, living across the country from my family, especially when I had children of my own with their own needs.  And yeah, I did feel this sense of guilt sometimes or just like questioning my choices, like should I have done something different with my life?  These are by the way basically my only skills, so I'm not sure what else I would've done.  And I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful that this is my life, that I have this career.  But it was and still is hard to think about, would I've been able to do more to help them at this crucial juncture?  Because like a lot of people, part of that bootstrap myth for me was like I'll be able to do this in enough time.   And what I didn't realize is that my parents and I did not have that time. We just didn't.  And I eventually got to a better place in my career, and I was able to help my mother a good deal more than I could help my father, from a practical standpoint. But my success as a writer really came too late to be of any help to him.  And that's -- it's impossible to live with, but I have to live with it.  And at the same time it shouldn't have come down to   I   when I got book royalties or sold my next book or advanced to a certain point in my publishing career. And my parents had this expectation that they would be able to take care of themselves.  And as it turned out, I think it was a reasonable expectation on their part as people who'd worked hard all their lives, but in the end they just didn't have all of the resources and the support that they needed.

Jo Reed:  And then you’re very quickly confronted with a mother who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness who lives across the country, a pandemic, and you’re left need to balance the responsibilities of being a daughter with being a mother. 

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean this is something I think is also going to be a common experience to many listeners. You know, the so-called sandwich generation where you're caring for your own children while trying to support and care for elders often far away from you, and that was always going to be difficult.  But the fact that it was right on the heels of my father's death, and then the fact that it happened-- her starting hospice care -- as the world went into pandemic lockdowns, it obviously complicated matters a great deal.  So, yes, it often just felt impossible to balance those responsibilities.

Jo Reed:   And she wasn't alone, though, her sister was with her. And her church community was very, very important to both your parents, and you write about that very movingly, I think. 

Nicole Chung:  Thank you.  I was honestly unsure about how to write about it just because I wasn't part of my parents' religious community we didn't share a faith tradition, and I also didn't live nearby.  But I did get to know some of my mother's closest friends after my father died and while my mother was dying, when I was able to visit before the pandemic. They were supporting her in so many ways.  I mean the obvious things, visiting and bringing food, but also I remember one of her church friends was the reason I was able to have these really difficult conversations with her about her will, about end of life care, and advanced directives, just about what her wishes really were.  Because my mother, like many people, and it's so understandable, it was really hard for her to talk about these things.  I was trying to do what I thought was my responsibility and support her in these important end of life decisions, but for her I think it was really hard at first to let me in.  And it was because of her friends from church, I think, that we were able to sit down and have that conversation because they were in the room with us, supporting both of us.  So there were countless ways, practical and otherwise, that that community was there for her and for my father.  I was very moved to see that kind of love in action.  I'm really grateful that they had it. 

Jo Reed:  You write very eloquently about how crushed you were that you couldn't be with her, and that seems so present in the book.  I think one difference between your first memoir and A Living Remedy is the first memoir seems things were resolved, you know, and you were writing about things that had happened a decade or more earlier, whereas A Living Remedy is so immediate, you know, we're watching this process with you. 

Nicole Chung:  I mean one of many reasons this book was terrifying to write was that immediacy.  I've mentioned, of course, I took a lot of time off from writing, from working on this after my mom died, but it was still very fresh grief.  And I think the reason some parts feel like they're happening in the moment is, well, first of all it's how I tried to write those sections.  But also I wasn't exactly working on the book, but I would -- like, I'm a daily journaler, I've kept journals forever and ever. And I was recording a lot of details and conversations, like things my mother said to me, things that I sent her, things I wanted to remember.  It wasn't for the book, it was just because that's always how I've processed those things.  So when the time came to actually write the book, I had these details and like these memories of really visceral emotion, and I guess I was still feeling it, right, because the grief was so fresh.  And I had never written anything in the moment that before it.  As you mentioned, my first book has a lot of emotional resonance for me.  I wasn't writing about easy things in that book either, but they were more settled, they were more resolved.  That book didn't have a lot of surprises for me in the writing.  I knew where it began and ended while I was working on it.  But A Living Remedy, because I had to rewrite it, because it was not the book I thought I was going to be writing, frequently surprised me.  I didn't always know where it was going.  I think one of the better writing days was when I figured out, oh, I know what the last chapter is, I know how this book ends.  But I still had to write more than half the book at that point, I had no idea how I was going to get to that ending, I just knew very clearly what I wanted it to be and still hoped to have that destination, but everything before then I was like how do I get there?  I really had to learn to trust myself as a writer in ways that had never been demanded of me before.  I don't think I could have written this book four or five years ago.  I don't know that I had the trust in myself.  Some of it is skill progressing, but a lot of it is just faith in the process and in yourself as a writer.  And I think I needed to develop that before I could tell a story like this. 

Jo Reed:  Well, memoir is such a unique animal.

Nicole Chung:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  It’s your life, or part of your life, but it's also an art form.  And your book is living at the intersection of your personal loss and belonging, and broader societal issues.  And I'm curious how you navigated the balance between sharing your own narrative and engaging with the larger discussions.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean I always knew those larger discussions were going to come into it. I think that stories can often be a way in to issues. Of course, I don't think people who pick up this book are unaware of the problems in our healthcare system or with our safety net and its inadequacies.  But I do think that for a lot of people stories, personal stories, can be a new way into these issues and these topics or like can reframe them in a way and help us reconsider things we thought we knew, or things that we haven't experienced ourselves and feel we need to grapple with.  But the main thing is there was just no writing honestly about my father's death without talking about why he died at 67.  Like I guess I could have tried to write maybe a more traditional grief memoir that was primarily about like just about that loss and the fallout, and that could be very important and really compelling.  I know that.  But for me such a big aspect of my grief, and my mom's grief too, was dealing with the fact that we lost him too young and that we didn't believe it was inevitable. We knew it was because he'd been failed over and over again by these systems.  It just felt I wouldn't have been being honest about what happened or honest about my own grief if I didn't take that into account.  And kind of similarly with my mom--just the fact that I wasn't able to be with her at the end, and I had to live stream her funeral, which again is something so many people lived through during the pandemic.  I didn't want to write a book that included this pandemic. That was very daunting to me.  But how could I write about losing my mother in the spring of 2020 and not talk about what it meant that that was happening against the backdrop of this pandemic, and the ways it kind of kept us apart.  And so, yeah, as you said -- because it is my life, because these were things that just happened, I didn't feel there was any way to write about my grief and the story I wanted to share, and like my family's legacy, without going into some detail about these larger structural issues as well.

Jo Reed:    Nicole, would you read the last paragraph of the first chapter of A Living Remedy?

Nicole Chung:  Okay.  I'm happy to read that. 

.I think of those late afternoon talks with her now that I have my own children, knowing that the days of both of them falling asleep in their rooms down the hall from mine are dwindling, that a time will come when something trivial or life-changing will happen to them.  They'll be hurt, or caught by surprise, or find that they're happier than they've ever been, and I will not be the first person they tell.  That might be why I sometimes let them stay up past bedtime chatting with me or getting silly with each other, why even the brightest moments on the best of days can crack my heart wide open.  But then sometimes I think, well, no matter where they go, no matter how far apart we are, maybe I will always be someone they think to call, someone they want to talk to.  Because my mother's far beyond my sight, beyond the reach of my voice, and not a day goes by when I don't think of something I wish I could tell her.

Jo Reed:  Nicole, the book begins and ends with your mother.  Other than that it's chronological.  But she really is the thread running through it and the foundation of the book.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  And it wasn't always that way.  I mean, of course, like our relationship was always central to the story.  I thought she would actually be much more involved in the writing of it.  I remember when I started working on the chapters about my father's illness and death, for example, she was the one I was checking facts with, and she was the one I was talking with and processing it with because it was her grief and mine, you know, more than anyone else's.  And then when she got sick, and when I knew I was going to lose her too, I didn't want to bother her with like book stuff, and it wasn't really top of mind for me either.  But there are some chapters about my dad where you can see my mother's stamp, or you could if you were looking for it, because she was really, I think, the family storyteller before I was.  And almost everything I know about my father's early life, when he met my mother or the early years of their marriage, like that's all from her.  In some sense she's like the bridge between us, you know, especially after his death when I couldn't ask him questions anymore.  So I don't know, once I figured out that really our relationship was the heart of this book, and as you read, when you experience like my father's illness, or my distance from home, or his death, it is very much kind of filtered through the lens of my mother's experience, my mother's telling of it I guess, and she and I are experiencing that together as we experienced her illness together despite the geographical distance.  So, yeah, she definitely is -- that relationship is the heart of the book in many ways. 

Jo Reed:  The title A Living Remedy comes from the poem, “For Three Days” by Marie Howe.  Can you explain that title and what that poem means to you and means to the book?

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  So, I had written everything but the title, you know, it was the last thing that we really needed to decide on.  And I was reading so many things-- looking through my book, looking for phrases that jumped out at me, I was reading a lot of poetry.  So I was looking at the Bible even though it's not a religious book, and I'm not a very religious person any longer, but religion was so important to my parents that I was kind of looking for inspiration there.  So, Marie Howe's poem “For Three Days,” there's a beautiful line, and I use it as an epigraph in the book.  But it goes, because even grief provides a living remedy.  And I love that phrase.  It spoke to me immediately.  I'm sure there's many different interpretations and meanings, but it made me think about how much of grief is the during and after.  Like there is no really moving on from it, but you do keep living, and when you live you are remembering the people that you lost.  So I like that living, that life was part of the phrase.  It felt like a forward looking phrase to frame this book.  And the idea of how grief can be a remedy, it can be its own kind of solace, kind of spoke to me because I had spent a lot of time after my father's death just running from the grief or trying to not live with it because it was so, so unbearable.  And it was really only when I let myself grieve in this deeper way and an honest way that I began to feel like I could keep going, like I could keep living.  No one looks for grief, it's obviously not something you seek out.  But I don't think it can be avoided either, not without hurting yourself even more.  So much of this book, of A Living Remedy, is about learning to grieve, to live with grief without self-punishment. And so I just felt the title spoke and the phrase spoke really beautifully to that as well.  So I wrote to Marie, actually, and I asked her for permission to use the phrase, and I'm just very grateful to her for allowing me to use it because I think it's really perfect for the book, and her work has meant so much to me for many, many years. 

Jo Reed:  I actually think it's perfect for the book too, and I think it's an extraordinary book, and I truly thank you for writing it. 

Nicole Chung:  Thank you so much. 

Jo Reed:  That was writer Nicole Chung. We were talking about her memoir  A Living Remedy.  Her first memoir is the critically acclaimed All You Can Ever Know. We’ll have a link to Nicole’s website in our show notes. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed….

Meg Medina:  I wouldn't have said, "Yes, I'm only going to write for young people," when I first started, but my whole life sort of pointed me that way, right? I had been teaching. I liked children's books. I liked reading. I really, really enjoy the company of young people. I was a mom. Like there were all these experiences that were pointing me in that way, so when I finally sat down to write, that's what emerged. This alchemy of family story and culture and young people.

Jo Reed:  That was author and the Library of Congress’s 2023-24 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Meg Medina, the first Latina to serve as Ambassador in the program’s history. 

During her two-year term, Meg Medina looks to engage readers across the country to embrace the joy of reading and encourage connection among families, classrooms, libraries and communities by talking about books that both reflect the readers’ lived experiences and those that open them up to new perspectives. 

This diversity of perspective is something Meg has been advocating her entire writing life. Herself a Cuban-American, Meg’s protagonists are strong, if flawed, Latina girls. Her books examine how culture and identity intersect through the eyes of young people even as they explore problems familiar to any kid navigating home and school. For example, her award-winning YA novel “Yacqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass” looks at bullying, while “Burn Baby Burn” takes place in NYC in 1977 the summer serial killer Son of Sam terrorized the city, Her middle-grade novel the 2019  Newbery Medal Awardee “Merci Suárez Changes Gears,” is  the first of three books in a trilogy about the Suárez family and the illness of a beloved grandparent while her recent award-winning picture book,  “Evelyn Del Rey Is Moving Away,” examines change in the life of a young child. Whatever the target age, Meg’s books are alive with vibrant characters and have a laser-like focus on authenticity and truth.

I spoke with Meg Medina shortly after she was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and I began by asking her what she thought we should know about her.

Meg Medina:  I am a writer who writes picture book, middle grade, and young adult fiction. I float pretty easily from one age group to the other. My background is Cuban-American. My parents arrived in this country in the early '60s and the rest of my family throughout the '60s and '70s. But I grew up here. I was born here. So, I was the first North American born in my family, which was a strange position to be in. I was sort of the translator general for the family. Not only literally, translating English in forms and things like that, but just culturally what this country was and how things were here and what was okay in childhood here. What were the books? What were the styles? All the things. What were the normal activities of an American kid? And so, I feel like that experience of growing up in an immigrant household where money was tight. When language was both a joy, an expansion, being able to speak Spanish and English. But also, an obstacle sometimes. All of those experiences I think I'm going to be able to bring with me into the Ambassadorship for the better. I think we have so many different kinds of people in this country and so many languages spoken and I just think it'll be helpful to be able to connect with them.

Jo Reed:  Where were you raised?

Meg Medina:  I was born in Alexandria, but I wasn't there, interestingly. Just before my birth, my parents' marriage dissolved. And so, my mother found herself in this country with no relatives. You know, everybody was still back in Cuba, but she did have a cousin, Minna Hernandez who lived in Queens New York, and Minna got on the Greyhound Bus and came to Alexandria. She taught my mother this concept called the garage sale <laughs>, this American concept. They sold everything that wasn't nailed down and then my mom brought us to New York, the biggest city in the world, right? And when I think back on what that must have been for her. But she raised us. She raised my sister and me in New York in the '60s and '70s, which was a hot time in New York City. <laughs> And that must have really been, I think bewildering for her. Then I spent some time in Massachusetts. I lived in Florida for ten years where my own three children were born. And interestingly, because life is funny that way, through job transfers and so on of my husband, we ended up back in Virginia. And today I live in Richmond.

Jo Reed:  Well, New York certainly is a multicultural hub with a large Latino population

Meg Medina:  Yeah, and certainly in Queens. Queens is, I think, the most diverse county in the U.S., for sure one of the most diverse places. When I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, it was a really interesting mix of people. There were, the older sort of European immigrants from Greece, from Italy, Ireland-- that group. But there was a big group of Cubans who had just arrived, Columbians, Indian families were growing and of course, it was the beginning of the establishment of the Asian population in Flushing, which is now heavily Korean. So, it was everybody. It was a wonderful way I think to grow up. It offered just the daily experience of living and learning with people who are like you in lots of ways, have families and jobs and concerns and all of those things, and also really different. I'm really grateful for that experience.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, I grew up in New York, too, and when I think back now-- just in my building, how many first-generation people were in that building, but from literally all over the world. And to me it was just natural, like breathing out and breathing in. But now I look back and I realize how lucky I was.

Meg Medina:  Yeah, I think so, too. It was just a natural way to learn how to be and share space with people and be respectful and learn from each other, you know, and love each other and see each other as part of the community.  

Jo Reed:  Where was reading in your life when you were young?

Meg Medina:  Well, you know, it was in lots of places. Interestingly, so there were not a lot of Latino characters, obviously in the books that I was reading in the '60s and '70s, or at least not in the books that were being introduced to me. I was being given the books that many kids in the early '70s were being given, the Judy Blume, Witch of Blackbird Pond, My Side of the Mount-- all of those sorts of old classics. I read all of those and I enjoyed them. I liked reading. Mostly I liked story. And so, I didn't need to have the character look exactly like me to enjoy the escape that reading provided me. My family, though, were real storytellers, just naturally. They, I think, processed their trauma through story. So, they process like their leaving their country and their family. I was filled with stories of what Cuba looked like, and who their neighbors had been and the time that So-and-So, did this. It was just a constant storytelling in the family. And for all kinds of purposes--sometimes to advise me in life. "I knew a person who did this once and look what happened to them," and I'd get this whole story. They used story in lots of different ways. So, I think I just sort of naturally developed an ear for that kind of drama and the interest in how people behave. And I find that in my work all the time. You know, when I'm writing, I'm really fascinated, not exactly by like the events of the novel, but by how the characters respond to those events. And so, I just feel like that I could trace right to storytelling. And then in terms of reading, you know, my mother did the best that she could. I mean, she had been a teacher in Cuba, so she knew the value having knowledge. My mother was wise enough to get me a library card, to get us the Encyclopedia, to let us buy books through the Troll Book form, those little order forms that used to come through school Even though money was really, really tight. I think she really liked to see us figuring out language, being able to read in English. Being able to know things. That mattered to her.

Jo Reed:  Well, you taught for ten years before you turned to writing.  

Meg Medina:  I did.

Jo Reed:  Was it a vocation for you, sort of inspired by your mother? How did you come to teaching?

Meg Medina:  <laughs> That's really funny. I came to teaching kicking and screaming. Okay, here's how-- here's the true story of how Meg Medina became a teacher. I did not want to be a teacher because my mother wanted me to be a teacher. My mother wanted me to either be a teacher or inexplicably a translator at the U.N. I don't know why she thought that <laughs> could be possible, but okay. Or the other thing she also often mentioned was the phone company. The phone company was a good place. And my mother really wanted me to have health benefits, and she wanted me to have security, and she didn't want me to worry as she did here as a factory worker about those kinds of concerns. Like how you were going to feed yourself and house yourself. And those seemed like really practical jobs. So, I graduated college and I went to work at Simon and Schuster where I was the worst Editorial Assistant probably ever. I was not good at it. And you know, then as now, life in Manhattan is expensive and having a wardrobe for those kinds of jobs and getting yourself there, all of that cost money. And I was from what was then, especially, another universe in the Boroughs, right, in Queens. I just was not suited to that job. And I decided to leave it, because believe it or not, I could make more money as a public schoolteacher, and New York City was having a teaching shortage. So, all you had to do was promise to take 15 credits and then they'd give you control over the fate of 36 poor little kids in your class, right? So, they sent me to P.S. 19, which is the largest elementary school in Queens, or it was at the time. And my students came mostly from the Dominican Republic, very recently arrived. Some like within days. The beginning was pretty rough, I go to say, right, because they have a teacher who does not know things like, "What is a lesson plan?" and other basics that are important. But here's what happened in very short order. This job that I took just sort of as a placeholder while I really figured out what I quote/unquote "really" wanted to do, it just took me because the kids were adorable. And I felt really connected to their families, like their experiences were very familiar to me--their neighborhood, all of it. And I just fell in love with them, with children's literature, and what I most remember about that year is the last day of school when I sat at my desk and I just cried, because I was going to miss them and I was worried that their next year's teacher wouldn't maybe love them or respect them in the way that I felt that I did, or I don't know, I just was so attached to them. And then I just stayed teaching. I got very curious. I went to the Louis Armstrong School and then I taught at an Arts Magnet School in Florida. And I just became enamored with literature and writing and children's books and young people of every age. They kept me laughing, they were maddening sometimes-- especially the teenagers later, they were asking really hard bold questions. And I loved all of that, all of that, very unexpectedly.

Jo Reed:  You made the next transition and you were 40 when you decided to make the leap and begin to write.

Meg Medina:  Yeah.

Jo Reed:  What motivated that?

Meg Medina:  So I had been teaching writing for a long time. But I wasn't doing much of it myself. In other words I was teaching other people how to give voice to the things they were curious about, but I was not completely fulfilled in teaching. I loved it. I loved my students, but there was something still missing. And the missing thing was that I really wanted to be writing. So, I started small. I started writing at little newspapers and I wrote I can't tell you how many articles for like $50 an article. It was just a ridiculous starvation kind of wages. But I built up my clips. I built up a thick skin to be able to edit. Like when an editor says, "Yeah, the lead is terrible, you got to rewrite it. Ten minutes," <laughs> you know, you can't get darling about your words then, right? You have to be able to separate and do the thing,

So, I started that way, but mostly, when I turned to children's writing it was more dramatic. I had moved to Virginia with Javier and we had three kids. And I was in a new city and my friendships were largely with the mothers and fathers of my children's friends. And I was living in a suburb and there were very few Latinos and I felt disconnected from the arts community, and I felt just lonely. I felt really spectacularly lonely. And so, at 40 I knew someone through a board that we sat on, who said to me one day, "Have you ever thought of like thinking of a vision statement for yourself? Like what do you want your life to look like as a writer and an artist, if this is what you say that you're missing?" And so, I did it. I came home. It felt ridiculous, I have to say, it felt ridiculous.  But I did it, I wrote it, and I kept that piece of paper. The first thing is that I got very weepy when I finished reading it, because I thought, "This is ridiculous. Who am I to wish these things? This is just silly. It felt like I was writing fantasy. What's interesting is I wrote that document in like 2003 maybe. I don't remember the exact year but almost everything that I wrote came true. I don't know how to explain it, but I share that story with writers a lot, because sometimes putting it down, like getting it out of your imagination and putting it down on a piece of paper like it's a tangible thing that you can look at, helps raise your sights. It helps you sometimes be more accountable. Like, “this is what I want, so what's one thing I could do today to move me closer to that?" And that's how I just started moving in that way and one thing led to the other and here I am. It's not like you write the wildest wish and it comes true. It's not like a genie in a bottle. But taking yourself seriously.

Jo Reed:  It can focus the mind.

Meg Medina:  Yeah, I think so. I think so. So, I think it's an important exercise to do with writers, with kids, with everyone as we're growing up, "What is that you want?"

Jo Reed:  And was it always books for young people?

Meg Medina:  No, but it's hard to say. I wouldn't have said, "Yes, I'm only going to write for young people," when I first started, but my whole life sort of pointed me that way, right? I had been teaching. I liked children's books. I liked reading. I really, really enjoy the company of young people. I was a mom. Like there were all these experiences that were pointing me in that way, so when I finally sat down to write, that's what emerged. This alchemy of family story and culture and young people. It ended up being like a clava, which is the rhythm in Cuban music that 3/2 rhythm, or 2/3 rhythm that is sort of the underpinning of Cuban music, so like you can't-- that just never changes in a composition, right, no matter what you put on it. And I feel like that. That ended up being my clava--growing up and culture and family.

Jo Reed:  Well, your books are very, very different from picture books, to middle grade, to YA. And they're different characters encountering different challenges and different joys. But there are commonalities and you mentioned family is certainly one of them. What are some of the others?

Meg Medina:  Oh, I think girls finding their voice, for sure. I think love, especially within families. Because when we talk about families, the very same people who love us so very much, sometimes really hurt us. And looking at that little sliver feels important to me. I think I am willing to walk into grief and hard things with children. And bring them through the experience like honestly and safely. Whether that's the death of someone, whether it's a violent family secret, whether it's bullying. But those really hard dark spaces that kids go through growing up, I like to feel that they don't have to do it completely alone. They can sort of experience it, practice it, read about it, think about it, with one of my books as their companion.

Jo Reed:  You know, while the experiences your characters encounter are culturally very, very specific, they are familiar to first-generation kids from anywhere. As you mentioned translating not just English, but habits, culture, technology to parents and sending money back home. This is first-generation. That's what happens.

Meg Medina:  Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's one of the joys. I love that. I love when that happens. I love when someone who has nothing to do with me-- like I had a young woman in Wisconsin, she came to me and she said, "Oh, my gosh. “Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass”, that's my story!" This is not your story <laughs> is what I was thinking about. I was like, "This is so different. This is a Queens Latina girl," you know? But for her this issue of being bullied, of being targeted, being alienated at school all of that really resonated with her. And certainly, that has happened with “Burn, Baby, Burn” and with others. It's really rewarding. I mean, so being able to be both specific and universal at the same time. And that comes, I think, truly from just being very honest to the experience. And that's the experience I have when I read other people's books outside of my experience of my own cultural experience. I'm drinking in all that they are opening up to me. I'm drinking in the culture, the language, the customs, all of it. And I'm also feeling connected and seen in those moments where those events, those people, an attitude that a character has resonates with someone I know or something I've seen. And that I think is at the heart of why children's literature can be so powerful. Especially when we create really robust inclusive collections,  in classroom libraries and school libraries and neighborhood public libraries. Because it knits us together. It allows us to do both things. To celebrate all that we are and all the cultures that make us up as a country, and who we are as people. Like just as human beings. The commonality. And I think that is really vital especially now.

Jo Reed:  Well, it's kind of the alchemy of literature, that strange alchemy that happens when the more specific you are, somehow the more universal it becomes.

Meg Medina:  Mm hm, for sure. I believe that's true. And making sure that the cultural details are exactly right. There's something about that that is deeply respectful and necessary in literature. Especially literature for children. We want to make sure that the books that we're offering them are accurate, so that they have true understanding of who their neighbors are, who they are themselves. You know, just getting it right really matters. And I think just as you say the specific and the universal is the flipside of the same coin.

Jo Reed: How do you start any book? Do you start with an idea, with a character?

Meg Medina: Usually the character and the age, that frames the concern. So, if I’m going to write a story, a kid’s in the hospital. It’s a very different experience if you’re six versus if you’re seventeen, right? So, the age really helps frame the voice for me and that’s the first thing I’m really looking for, the character’s voice, their personality, what they sound like, and what their initial problem is. And when I say initial, it’s not just the first thing that comes up, but like the problem the character is willing to tell me at first when I just know them minimally. It’s like going to a dinner party with people, right? You get “Oh, hi, this is so and so. They do this for a living.” You’re knowing these very superficial things-- they’re important details, but they’re not really the story of that person. As I write the book, as I’m exploring this so-called problem that they have, usually they crack open and we get to the deeper issue. Somewhere, I don't know, around page 50 or 60, I have a much deeper idea of what the character is really up against and then we start mining, for sure. So, I always start that way. Although, I say that and I’m working on a fantasy right now and I’m just finishing up the manuscript and I started with setting on that one, which I’ve never really done. I started with a sense of place and who is in that place and then I pulled the character from there, but the place was very, very important. It takes place in the abyss in the ocean.

Jo Reed:  Wow… How much do you look at your own background, your own girlhood when you write? If not for the experiences themselves but for the kind of questions you were asking yourself.

Meg Medina:  Oh, gosh, 100 percent of the time. Really.  People ask, "Why you write for children?" And the truth is you're actually not, right? You're writing for who you were at a particular age. I know that sounds so narcissistic, but that's what actually ends up happening, at least in my process. When I'm writing someone 15/16, I inhabit who I was at that age and the things that hurt me at that age, and the outrage I felt at different things at that age--all of it. I try to become that person again. And to do that, I have to go back through memory. I have to unpack things that in some cases I don't want to think about at all and really think about them and lay them bare, and decide like what part of that still resonates now and why have I remembered it for 30 years or 40, you know, whatever? And come to some revelation that I can provide with the character in the story. So, I feel like with Yaqui Delgado for sure, I was bullied in exactly the way that you see in Chapter 1. It happened to me a little earlier in junior high school, but that was essentially what happened. “Burn, Baby, Burn”, I was 14 the summer that Son of Sam was murdering girls in Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and so on, all the boroughs-- you don’t live through that without remembering that and certainly, I knew family troubles and depression and things like that in the house, which are also themes in “Burn Baby Burn,” all of it. I pull from my life shamelessly and I use my books not only to create entertainment and artful pieces, but really to unpack and understand all that has happened.

Jo Reed: It’s interesting because when I read young people’s literature, my emotions are much more on the surface. I’m a pretty engaged reader in general, but with young people’s literature, I laugh more. I cry more. I know at a certain point, I found myself saying “Oh, Mercy, don’t do that. Just don’t do that.”

Meg Medina: Me too. I do the same thing because I don’t plot these books. I write them very intuitively. So, I sit down and I just follow Mercy through the story. Like, I have vague ideas of what might happen just because the age and the setup, but generally, I’m very surprised and I can’t tell you how many times I said that to Merci, like “Oh, come on. You can do better. Come on, Merci. Tell the truth. Step up.” I had all kinds of motherly advice. But that’s the thing. The mother, the writer, that person has to step away. When you really give yourself to writing a book for kids and you’re writing it this way, where the character is sort of leading you, you have to leave all of the adult concerns far away. They’ll have a place, but it’s not in the drafting of the book.

Jo Reed:   Let’s talk about Merci Suárez and the wonderful Suarez family. How did the Merci Suárez series come to be

Meg Medina: I started that as a short story. It’s in an anthology called “Flying Lessons and Other Stories.” Ellen Oh from We Need Diverse Books invited me into that anthology. It was ten authors from different backgrounds and we needed to just write a story that featured a character who was from a  traditionally marginalized background and so, I said “Sure. I’m going to write a Latina character.” So what? I would say after you say yes and you sign the contract, it’s like “Okay, but she doesn’t sit around just thinking about her Latinidad, right?  So, I wanted to look at this notion of what parents are willing to do for their kids to move them ahead and sometimes they have to swallow some really bitter pills. So, in the story “Sol Painting, Inc.,” Merci is about to start school at this private school where here genius brother is also attending and her father has traded his painting skills-- he’s going to paint the school gym in exchange for some tuition breaks and it was a look at what it’s like to be a scholarship kid, but more what it’s like to be invisible, one of these careers that people think of as invisible, yard workers, painters, like they call you “The Paint Guy,” “The Yard Guy,” like you’re nameless. And her father is that and yet, she’s going to be a student at this fancy school and the push and pull of that, the shame, the pride, the fury, all of the feelings that go into that, into finding yourself being asked to be grateful for this wonderful opportunity that is being given to you and also frustrated and having lots of feelings about what it’s like to move in those circles. So, I wrote the story. I loved the story and then the book did really well. It’s in a lot of school libraries and I just couldn’t stop thinking about Merci and both the editor, Phoebe Yeh, who edited that anthology, and my editor at Candlewick said the same thing, “Merci is just too big for a story. I think you want to write a novel for her,” and I did and that was “Merci Suarez Changes Gears,” and that was her in the sixth grade and then I kept thinking of the metamorphosis that happens from sixth to eighth grade and I said “I’ll just keep going.” Sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade and then it gives me a chance to really have her deal completely with her grandfather and middle school and all of the things that are bananas about middle school.

Jo Reed: It is the most wonderful series. I read the first book when it came out and I was just so entranced and jumped on each one as soon as they came out. So, thank you for doing it.

Meg Medina: You’re welcome. I’m proud of that series.  I’m glad like that I’m leaving it behind. It was hard to say goodbye to the Suárez family because I want to be adopted by them, but I feel like I told the whole story and I don't know, I hope kids continue to find the Suárez’s in the years to come.

Jo Reed: I’m sure they will. Now, you’re the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. So, tell me about your ideas for this role.

Meg Medina: Wow. Yeah. It’s big. So, my idea is that I want to rescue reading from this sort of notion as something that belongs only to schools, that we test. Just think about how we talk about reading to kids. “If you don’t read by this age, this is going to happen or that’s going to happen. Your ears will fall off,” like all these really dire warnings that may in fact be true if we’re looking at the data and so on, but it’s the reading joy that seems to come last. And I really want to rescue reading and reconnect kids to reading in a different way and thinking about reading and talking about reading in a different way. So they ask you to design a framework for how you’re going to move throughout your two years and my framework is called “¡Cuéntame! Let’s Talk Books!” So, “¡Cuéntame!” is this phrase that Spanish speakers use, like when we don’t see each other for a while and it’s like “Hey, what’s up?” We say “¡Cuéntame! What’s up?” Like, “Tell me what’s going on.” So, mine is “¡Cuéntame! Let’s Talk Books.” When I visit schools, they’ll have a chance to ask me questions about my work and all of that, but mostly, I’ll be modeling for them, I’ll be book talking for them the books that I am reading and loving and want to shout about. So, when we talk about books that we love to somebody else, we’re not only talking about the book. We’re also talking about ourselves. We’re sharing  what excites us, what we love, what we think is interesting and so, that, I think, is where connection is. Like, if I come to you and say “Oh, my gosh Jo, you’ve got to read this book because...” and I’m super excited, I’m sharing myself with you in a very important way. So, I’ll be book talking to them and I’m hoping that they’re going to book talk to me the books that they’re reading. I’m already getting suggestions in the mail from kids. I’ve been given lots of suggestions for manga and graphic novels, which I’m devouring as quickly as I can.

 Another part of my platform of ¡Cuéntame! is connecting families with the public library, especially now. I am a huge library fan and a huge fan of librarians and they’re just not the shushing places of yesteryear. They are vibrant places that have something for everybody in the family. And so, creating a push for library cards and highlighting really great programs that are going on in different libraries, I’m really just encouraging kids to think of the library as a place to go to gather books to make it part of their life. And then the last part I’m really interested in is just creating sort of an audio archive at the Library of Congress of new authors creating work now. I think what happens sometimes is we rely on the voices and the names that we’ve known or that our parents read when they were little, like the biggies and they’re great and they endure for a reason. But, my feeling is we’re in a golden age of children’s literature. There are just so many incredible authors coming to the table and writing from all sorts of experiences and so, I want to have a place where the kids can just come and click and hear the author read us what they think is their best minute or two of writing, tell us why they think that is a great minute or two and also share with us something they believe is true about children and reading. I think when we hear an author’s voice, when we hear their work in their voice, it's thrilling. So, those are right now the three main prompts of ¡Cuéntame! Now, as every good teacher will tell you, you plan. You put it into effect and then you just sort of see what’s sticking, what’s working, and you make adjustments. So, I think as the ambassadorship moves forward, there will be adjustments. But right now, that’s what I’m cooking.

 

Jo Reed: As you look ahead to the next two years, what are you most looking forward to?

Meg Medina: What am I most looking forward to? I think I am most looking forward to connecting with kids. Like, being able to spend two years really going into schools that have applied to have me come, who have collaborated with their public library, who have given like deep, deep thought to our time together and then being there in community with that whole school community, their moms and dads, their teachers, their school librarians, their neighborhood librarians, like helping them knit themselves together around books and being part of that. That, to me, feels really, really exciting.

Jo Reed: Okay. That is a good place to leave it. Meg Medina, thank you and congratulations and I’m thrilled.

Meg Medina: Thank you so much, Jo. I really appreciate the time.

Jo Reed: You’re welcome.  That is author and Library of Congress’s 2023-24 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Meg Medina. She’s the author of many books including the Merci Suarez trilogy and award-winning picture book,  “Evelyn Del Rey Is Moving Away,” You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Music Credits:  Regina Carter, recorded live in New Jersey, November 7, 2022

“Time After Time” composed by Stéphane Grappelli and performed by Stéphane Grappelli and Joe Pass, from the album Tivoli Gardens (Live), 1990

“Optimistic,” composed by Gary Hines, James Harris III ,Terry Lewis from the album Body and Soul performed by Straight Ahead 1993.

“Ephemera Trilogy,” composed by James Emory, from the album Intermobility, performed by the String Trio of New York,1992

“Something for Grace” composed by Johnny Almendra and Regina Carter, from the album Something for Grace performed by Regina Carter, 1997

Jo Reed:  That is the music of NEA Jazz Master violinist Regina Carter and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

This is the first of a two-part interview with jazz great Regina Carter.  Regina Carter is renowned for her mastery of the violin-- exploring the instrument’s possibilities in jazz by drawing from a variety of musical influences – including  Motown, Afro Cuban,  Swing,  Folk, World, and of course the Blues.  A recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and an individual NEA jazz grant in 1990, Regina’s distinctive voice is apparent whether in her solo work or in her collaborations.  Trained as a European classical violinist, she brings that fluidity and grace to her playing as she takes jazz violin in unexpected directions. The focus in part 1 of this two-part podcast is Regina’s early life. I’m thinking of it as “portrait of the artist as a young woman.” We’re going to hear Regina share stories and insights about her upbringing in Detroit, her musical education in European classical and in jazz, and her early career. In other words, we’re going to try to trace how Regina Carter became Regina Carter.

Regina Carter: There was always music playing in my house. I have two older brothers, so they would be playing their records in their room and they were taking piano lessons. My oldest brother took piano and trumpet. That was Dan and Reginald, the brother right over me, took clarinet and piano. And my mom said that one day, while one of them was having their piano lesson, I walked up to the piano when I was two and started playing one of the tunes that Reginald had been working on and their teacher said, who taught her that? And they said, No one, we didn't even know she could play. And so that teacher, she tested me and told my mom I had an ear for music. And so I was enrolled in music lessons with another woman who dealt with children, Anna Love. And I would have my lessons weekly. And Anna was trying to teach me how to read music and I wasn't interested. I just wanted to play on the piano. And, Mrs. Love told my mother not to keep me in lessons then because she felt trying to force me to learn how to read would stifle my creativity. So she said, just let her continue to play at home and let's try again when she gets a little older.

Jo Reed: And how did violin get into the mix.

Regina Carter: When I was four. Anna Love called my mom and said, there's a new program being introduced in Detroit called The Suzuki Method and (it’s) for Strings. And she said, I think Regina would be great for it because it's a method where you learn to play by imitating the same way we learn how to speak when we're children. And my mom enrolled me. I don't know why I ended up with the violin, but soon after, maybe a couple of months after I started, my teacher gave everyone a chance to try all the different stringed instruments to see  if we wanted to switch. And I came right back to the violin, and I loved it from the beginning. I just loved playing. I had private lessons once a week. We'd have group sessions on the weekend. And my mom said, from the get go, I was a ham --and I loved being onstage there.

Jo Reed: You know, it sounds like the way you were taught violin is the perfect training for a jazz musician because it really is about learning to listen.

Regina Carter: Yes, the Suzuki method, some folks like it. Some people don't, you know, because they teach us how to read so late, at least my teacher did, that my reading isn't as strong as it could be, but that's something I could work on, on my own. But I feel like it's a natural way to learn music by ear. You think of most cultures of music --when you go to other cultures-- music is a part of their everyday lives, and it's a group thing, a family thing. Even here, you know, in the U.S., going back to the 50s 60s, either everyone had a piano or a guitar,  or people just their families would come together and sing. It just it wasn't a thing separate that you do. It was included in your everyday life. And I feel now that, it definitely helped me. As far as transitioning from your European classical music to jazz, because my ears were so strong I could hear and I wasn't afraid to improvise. I wasn't afraid to be off the paper.

[Jo Reed: Well, you trained as a classical European violinist. Can you tell me just a little bit about that training and how it worked for you.

Regina Carter: Studying the Suzuki method, Suzuki has several books and so you're learning all of these tunes. You're also learning rhythms. But after you get out of the Suzuki books, then you start learning the repertoire for auditioning for orchestras, for auditioning for colleges at a pretty young age. And you're learning all these major pieces. And my teacher, we work on these concertos, and certain Saturdays we would have a workshop and we would have to learn how to talk about the piece, talk about the composer, tell a little bit about the composer, and then play our piece. Even if we weren't finished with it, it just gave us practice to play and perform in front of our peers and their parents.

Jo Reed: You're in Detroit, which has just an amazingly rich musics of all sorts. what were you listening to during this time?

Regina Carter: Well, when I started when I started violin lessons, my teacher, Jean Rupert, would send each student home with a stack of European classical albums to listen to. And so she wanted those records going all day so that we could kind of soak in the music and the vibe of it and even going to sleep. She just said: you can also learn in your sleep by hearing, and it's another way of learning. And that's what I was listening to. And when you finish going through that stack, you take it back to the school and then you trade with another student. But of course, I had two other older brothers, so I heard the Beatles playing in my house, Motown, because Motown was started in Detroit. So if I put the radio on on my own, I hearing all these great, great songs by a lot of people that were from Detroit. So it was a mixture of everything. And Detroit, there were so many people that migrated to Detroit because of the automotive industry. So there was a lot of work there. So people came from the south, there was the Great Migration and there were a lot of immigrants that came to Detroit. So we had, and each, each group of people that came in kind of set up their own community. Of course I went to public school, so a lot of my friends were from these different cultures, or at least their parents. You'd hear all kinds of music, their classical music, or the things that they were listening to.  I had a chance to experience their culture, their food, their sounds. So there was there was a lot that I took in.

Jo Reed: You went to school in Detroit, Cass Technical, home of so many, so many great musicians. Is that where you first really discovered jazz? How did you how did you and jazz get together?

Regina Carter: Yes, I went to the famous Cass Tech High School. And we're everywhere. And when, everyone, anyone, a group of us gets together the people are like, oh, god, not another one. But, the school was humongous. There were 4000 students enrolled in the school. My graduating class was a little over a thousand, and you had to pretty much know what you were going to major in in college when you went to Cass and your grade point average had to be a certain place and stay there. So I was a music major and I took orchestra, all the music classes, plus our state requirements. And there was a bassist in the orchestra. And her name is Carla Cook, and she's a phenomenal jazz vocalist. And Carla brought me my first jazz recordings was of three violinists: Jean-Luc Ponty, Stéphane Grappelli and Noel Pointer. And when I took those records home and put them on, my mind was blown. I said, “This is what I want to do.” And so I just put the records on and listen and listen and learn them and stand in the mirror and play, play along with the records. And Carla took me when we were 16 and she got her driver's license. She took me to hear Stéphane Grappelli live in Detroit. It was a Stéphane Grappelli trio. And I remember just the joy on the musicians faces. And that really struck me. I just said, no matter what this music is called, I want to feel that joy and I want my audience to feel that joy. And so this is what I want to do. And it was so incredibly different than the way I was raised, playing European classical music, because it's such a serious music and no one ever smiles and you stand a certain way and you hold your bow a certain way.  And I, I think I felt really intimidated by that. And also going when I was at the Detroit Community Music School, which is the school I started studying, we would get discount tickets to go see, to hear, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra sometimes. And I remember taking my dad once because my mom was always the one that took me. But I took him to the concert with me and. They were playing a piece and I was so uptight I could barely enjoy the performance because I had to be ready after they played the first movement, to make sure he didn't clap. Because we weren't going to be the ones that everyone turned and looked at, all mortified. You know, that's not what music is about. If you feel good about something, you should be able to say, yeah, or clap or, you know. But all the rules, it just it didn't sit well. It didn't feel natural for me. So. So playing jazz, that was another thing. Just seeing Stéphane Grappelli face and seeing how happy he was and he could let his emotions come through that. That really spoke to me.

Jo Reed: Okay. I'm going to take I'm going to take a left turn now, because when I was young, one of the albums in in my house was an album called Fascinating Rhythms with Stéphane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin and I fell in love with jazz violin and listening to that album and then, you know, went on from there. But. Oh, It was so beautiful.

Regina Carter:  Yeah, it definitely was. And the one thing that I love about that album that Stéphane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin recorded together is the fact that you have someone here who is from this European classical tradition and he's opening himself up to improvise and to play this other music. And sometimes I find that a lot of European classical teachers or musicians will look down on jazz and other music because they feel it's beneath them. And speaking of Yehudi Menuhin, when I was in high school --I was on to my third teacher, I went back to the Detroit Community Music School, and there was a new teacher there, Dr. O'Pelt, and I was in a string quartet-- and Yehudi Menuhin was in town performing as a guest soloist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. And my teacher got Mr. Yehudi Menuhin to come and listen to our quartet and coach us. And at the end of the coaching, my teacher said, Yeah, she wants to play jazz, she's going to ruin her career. And Mr. Menuhin picked up his violin and played a blues lick and said, "leave her alone." I never forgot. That was such a huge gift.

Jo Reed: That's a great story. You went to the New England Conservatory of Music. Were you still pursuing a career in classical music? Where you adding jazz to the mix? Tell me about the transition.

Regina Carter: So after graduating high school, I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to practice and to gig. And I just said, I'd work a day job. And my mother always stressed, you have to go to college. So I told my mom, you want me to go to college? You pick. So I had several friends at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She chose that school. I went and auditioned and I got in. But during my audition for orchestra, they saw my application that I wanted to play jazz as well. And they kept asking, Well, which music do you prefer? Which I had to tap-dance around that answer. So I was there as a classical violinist, and plus my mother said I couldn't play jazz professionally. She wanted me to be in an orchestra with benefits, health insurance, retirement, blah, blah, blah.  So, I was there two years. My second year I didn't tell her I switched my major.  And I just, I did not have a good time there. I don't think I was a mature enough to be at a school without a campus. Back then it was just two buildings across the street from one another, and my dorm room faced the building where all the classes and practice rooms were. And it sounded like an insane asylum because you'd hear opera coming out of one window, a saxophone is blaring out of this one, something else coming -- just at all at the same time. It was pretty crazy, but there was no campus and Boston was very racist. I was walking-- I had an older woman, she had to be at least in her eighties, call me the N-word to my face. I was so stunned, I couldn't even say anything. and just some other things that happened. And I, I just didn't want to be there. So my mom, after two years, said I could come home and go to school in Michigan. So I transferred after my second year to Oakland University, which is in Rochester, Michigan, about a half hour from Detroit. And I remember going to the big band teacher, Doc Marvin Holiday, and I walked in and I said: listen, I want to play jazz, I play violin. And he said, okay, we're going to put you in the saxophone section. You're going to read the alto charts, breathe when they breathe, phrase how they phrase, and stop listening to violin players --because you don't want to sound like them. You want to find your own voice. And that set me on the right path. I'm so thankful for him and for him allowing me to be in that jazz department.

Jo Reed: You also had another great mentor in Marcus Belgrave, he's a trumpeter, who also mentored Kenny Garrett, your fellow NEA jazz master. And I'm curious what he gave you as a mentor.

Regina Carter: Marcus Belgrave was a mentor to so many musicians in Detroit: folks like Kenny Garrett, Marian Haden, Gerry Allen, Rodney Whitaker and the list goes on and on and on. And there were several other folks as well that mentored us. But Marcus would have camp, jazz camp at his house and we'd go during the week, five days a week. And we learn about playing in a group, soloing --and he taught us about the business of music, too. And we would play gigs with Marcus just to get used to actually being on the bandstand. He'd have us compose. We work with dancers. So Marcus was the father of so many of us in Detroit. And I'm really grateful for all that he gave us. And another thing, I think it's interesting, sometimes people can teach you things not by saying, or it's their actions are that teach you. And I remember being with Marcus and all of the musicians in Detroit, I never had any issues with them. They always respected me. They didn't care that I played violin and wanted to play jazz. And so I knew how I should be treated, because here are these people --Marcus Belgrave played with everyone, you know, toured the world, and he decided to stay in Detroit-- and so I knew how I should be treated. So when I got to New York and had some incidents here with musicians, I knew: no, I don't have to be treated this way. And so I would just remove myself from the situation. So I'm really thankful for all my mentors at Marcus for teaching me that lesson.

Jo Reed: You went abroad for a couple of years, and when you returned to Detroit, you came into the spotlight with the quintet Straight Ahead, which is a wonderful group of women musicians playing together. How did, how did you meet up with them? And tell me about that experience of playing with them?

Regina Carter: After graduating college, I went to Germany for a vacation and ended up staying two years and I moved back home, moved back to Detroit. I'd gone to school Oakland University with a drummer, Gayelynn McKinney, whose family they have a long history of jazz musicians. But Gayelynn called me and said, Listen, you know, I'm playing with Straight Ahead. And she said, We're looking for a saxophonist, but we couldn't find one. So I mentioned you on violin and do you want to join? And I said, Sure. So I went to a rehearsal, and all women, and I knew the bass player, our families had grown up [together], Marion Hayden. In fact, our moms met when they were. And so it was a wonderful group. We would rehearse several times a week and that helped me to strengthen not only my improvising but group playing and also soloing and writing. But I told them, I said, I'm not going to be in Detroit for long. I'm moving to New York. And I thought it would happen a lot sooner than it did, but it happened when it was supposed to. But I recorded, I believe, two or three records with them with Straight Ahead. And the first two were produced by the great drummer, Lenny White.

Jo Reed: Oh, and. Was that your first time in a recording studio? Was it with Straight Ahead?

Regina Carter: My first time in the studio was probably. Hmm. I was younger. I think I was still in high school. And actually while I was in high school, in I think 11th grade, there was a group, a pretty big group, like a pop rock group called Brainstorm --and they were touring, opening for people like the Jacksons and Mother's Finest --and I just happened to meet the saxophonist and  he asked, Do you want to join the band? And they had great string arrangements, which I still have here. And we begged my mother, Oh, we had to do some begging. We finally wore her down. And she said, If you keep your grades up, you can go outside, leave on a Thursday and come back that Sunday.  So I was familiar with touring and being in the studio before before I recorded with Straight Ahead. But recording with Straight Ahead was an amazing time because we recorded at a place called the Carriage House up in Connecticut and we stayed there. So it was a house that you could stay in together. And it was just it really helped the vibe of the music as well that we were we were together for that whole time we were recording.

Jo Reed: And you knew you were going to move to New York, all of us behind the decision to go. And I'm curious what you found when you got to New York.

Regina Carter: Early in my life, I knew that if I wanted, well I felt if I wanted, to be a successful jazz musician, that I would either have to move to New York or L.A. And so,  my older brothers lived in New York. They still live in New York. And so I just knew I needed to be there. I felt like I needed to be in New York. So I saved and saved and saved and finally moved to New York in 1991. And I was just terrified being in this new place that was so different, much more. It was much busier than Detroit. Even though Detroit's a city, it still feels like a suburb. But my friend Miche Braden had moved to New York beforehand, so we would go to jam sessions together. We were each other’s support team. And there were a lot of musicians that I knew that graduated from Berkeley School of Music in Boston that were living in New York as well. So I had a community, a support system there.

Jo Reed: And what was the music scene like and what music did you gravitate towards or did you gravitate towards all of this?

Regina Carter: When I moved to New York, I knew I needed to pay the rent. So whoever called for a gig, I was doing it. And so when I had names of people to call and one of the names was the late, great writer Greg Tate. And I called him and just said, look, I just moved here. I'm a violinist, if you hear of anything or need a violinist. And he had he had a group called Women in Love. And it was part of the Black Rock Coalition. And so I played in that band. I went to a lot of jazz jam sessions, but there were places I played in a funk band. I remember making friends with some other violin players, and one of them was playing in a Teranga Band with Afro-Cuban music. And I went and I subbed for him once, and then they pulled me into the band, which was a lot of fun. So it was just whatever, I didn't, and still today I just love music and so whatever it is, I'm game to try it. And I don't want to get stuck playing one music. And I always tell my students that it's very important for them to diversify because it's too difficult to think you're just going to get out here. And just today there's a tour waiting or there's an orchestra seat open for you.

Jo Reed: Well, that really leads to my next question, because you're playing with and listening to Afro-Cuban music, you play with the String Trio of New York, which, if we have to put a label on it, is more like free jazz sort of. And you accompanied performers like Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Mary J. Blige. And you also played with Max Roach. So I'm just wondering what you learned about your own playing during this time and about what you wanted to do as a player?

Regina Carter: I had several opportunities playing with many different great musicians and different styles of music. I had an opportunity to play a week I was subbing for Lisa Terry in the Uptown String Quartet, and it was the double string quartet with Max Roach's quartet and then the Uptown String Quartet. That music kicked my behind. I was scared to death every time I set foot on that stage. And with Max Roach --and Max Roach was like a god, you know? I couldn't believe I was sitting on stage with him and then playing Teranga music and having the opportunity to play with folks like Chucho Valdés and to play music with the Afro-Latin Jazz Organization, with Arturo O'Farrill, playing with Omara Portuondo, Dolly Parton, Mary J. Blige, on and on and on. So my thing was not to limit myself. I just and I think coming up in Detroit and hearing so many different styles of music was very helpful for me because it was just music. It's all just music to me. And so I never wanted to limit myself. And I remember when I first moved to New York, someone said to me: be careful playing all these different styles of music or playing with all these bands, because people will say, you're not serious. And I, I'm like, I love all these different styles and I'm not going to not play them. You know, people are going to say what they're going to say anyway.

Jo Reed: I would love to have you talk about developing your own voice in the violin and what that process was like for you and. I'm just also so curious about the violin itself, because it's one of those instruments that you're holding right next to your ear. There's something there's such an embrace of the instrument as you play it that just has to influence what comes out of it.

Regina Carter: I feel like the violin is an extension of my voice. Because it's a stringed instrument, you can get so many emotions and sounds out of it. And that was one benefit, one of the many benefits. Working with the string trio of New York, I learned about altered techniques, which sometimes might mean putting a paperclip across the strings or playing the ring, the strings with a dowel rod or something. So they're all these incredible sounds you can get out of the instrument. But I really feel like I'm singing when I'm playing the violin. And I've learned I learned through listening to records Ben Webster, Big Nick Nichols and other other folks, that when I would play and I could hear the end of their notes, I make sure I'm breathing because my bow is my breath. And then I have to take another breath in the vibrato, because in classical music, we the first thing we want to learn is had a vibrato and its like "nynyny" [vibrato sound]. And, you know, the thing is, is originally vibrato was supposed to be used as an embellishment, but it became a thing that everybody always uses. And it's just you don't that's like saying to someone, don't blink. They can't help it. And so I learned, even listening to Paul Gonsalves, was to slow that vibrato way down. And it's a [dun dun duuun] and then let it get towards the end or not using it at all. Sometimes it's great not to use it, but not to use it all the time. So whenever I play a tune that has lyrics, I learn the words and I'm actually singing them in my head when I'm playing, so that I'm playing the words. And if someone nails the melody, or even if they don't know the lyrics, they can hear them. They can hear them through my playing. Or at least they get they get the sentiment of the tune.

Music up

Jo Reed: Regina Carter released her first two solo albums Regina King in 1995 and Something for Grace in 1997 which was dedicated to her mother. But 1997 was a banner year for another reason—Wynton Marsalis invited Regina Carter to join the tour of his Pulitzer-Prize winning oratorio “Blood on the Fields.”  

Regina Carter: My first two records were categorized as Smooth Jazz, and I had that market that I was working in. But when I received a call from Wynton to tour with “Blood on the Fields”, touring with that group put me on the map, put me on the jazz map.

Jo Reed: And that’s where we’ll pick up the story next week with NEA Jazz Master Regina Carter—in part 2 Regina discusses touring with Blood on the Fields, her solo career, sharing her family history through her music, working with NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron, receiving the MacArthur Genius Award at a pivotal moment in her life, her time as a hospice worker, and much much more. That’s all next week in a music-filled part 2 of my conversation with Regina Carter

Regina Carter and the other Jazz Masters will be celebrated at a star-studded tribute concert which takes place Saturday, April 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The concert is free but tickets are required…you can reserve them at kennedy-center.org and if you can’t make it to DC—no worries!  The concert will also be available through a live webcast and radio broadcast. Check out arts.gov for details.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Music Credits:  Regina Carter, recorded live in New Jersey, November 7, 2022

“Up South” written and performed by Regina Carter and Russell Malone from the album Motor City Moments, 2000.

“Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy” (traditional!) from the album Southern Comfort performed by Regina Carter, 2014.

“Pavane pour une infante défunte,” for piano (or orchestra) by Maurice Ravel, performed by Regina Carter from the album, Paganini: After a Dream, 2003.

“Shades of Gray” by Regina Carter from the album Freefall, composed by Regina Carter, performed by Kenny Barron and Regina Carter, 2001.

“Judy,” composed by Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Lerner, performed by Regina Carter from the album, Ella: Accentuate the Positive,2016.

Jo Reed: You’re listening violinist and 2023 NEA Jazz Master Regina Carter and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.

This is the second of a two-part podcast with jazz artist Regina Carter. Last time, we traced Regina’s musical evolution, her upbringing in Detroit and the influence of that city on her musical development, we learned about her training in classical music and her transition to jazz, her early experiences playing jazz in Detroit and her move to NYC where she played with a variety of artists from Dolly Parton to Max Roach. We pick up today’s podcast where we left off: Regina had released her first two solo albums when she received a pivotal call from Wynton Marsalis to tour with his Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio, Blood on the Fields.

Regina Carter:  I was a soloist at that point. Solo recording artist still on Atlantic. And so my first two records were categorized as Smooth Jazz, and I had that market that I was working in. But when I received a call from Wynton to tour with Blood on the Fields, touring with that group put me on the map, put me on the jazz map, having that type of exposure. You can't you can't buy that. And it was such an incredible time. Just the piece, what it was about hearing. What everyone had to learn and feel and go through. And basically my piece came at the very end. And it was maybe about three minutes, four minutes worth of music. And I just started to myself. This is the only time I get to play during these two hours. I'm going to milk this. It just started playing a little bit longer each night. But it was an incredible time for me. And, you know, I think Wynton for calling me for that because that that put me on the map.

Jo Reed: As you moved further into your solo career, many of your albums center around a theme—I think your first themed record might have been Motor City Moments, your love song to Detroit, how did this celebration of Detroit come together,

Regina Carter: Well, I have so many I have so many wonderful memories from growing up in Detroit. And I wanted to make a record celebrating some of the folks, some of the musicians and people in some of the experiences I had. So I thought about some of the musicians I wanted to honor, so to speak, and some of the tunes I chose aren't by Detroit composers, like Chattanooga Choo Choo, that was the first tune, the first dance tap dance piece that I tapped to. I learned a routine on that in dance school. So that represented my life growing up, taking tap and ballet in Detroit. Love Theme from Spartacus, I heard Yusef, the great Yusef Lateef, recorded that and I fell in love with it and wanted to record that. Then, of course, I had Marcus Belgrave on a couple of tracks. I had I had to have him. I was I was so thrilled that he recorded with me. Also the great pianist Barry Harris. And it was so wonderful having Barry in the studio and with Marcus and they told these amazing stories. I wish that we had had a video camera rolling because there was so much history. And I remember talking to Barry on the phone and he says: well, what do you want to record? And I said, Well, I want to do "Fukai Aijo." And he said, Well, how does that go? And I laughed because it's one of his tunes. And in my mind: what? But you think about he's written thousands of tunes. He's not going to remember every tune. I just it was so it was such a beautiful moment for me.

Jo Reed: You also recorded one of your tunes “Up South,” more than one, but “Up South,” this great bluesy duet with guitarists Russell Malone.  And that leads me to ask you about your own compositions, and how you approach composing and what inspires you and what's your process for actually doing that?

Regina Carter: My process: fire under the butt. Its usually what works. [laughter] Now with that piece. Yeah, that's for sure.

With "Up South" on that record, Motor City Moments, I wanted to also recognize the migration, the great migration of people coming up from the South. And my dad's family. There were 14 kids and 13 siblings. And so they all came up one at a time and would get a job and then bring the next sibling up and get them situated. And my dad was from Alabama. He was from a coal mining town that doesn't exist anymore: Bradford, Alabama. And my grandfather, who I'd never met, was a coal miner.  But I wanted to honor my father and so I wanted to do "Up South," but I didn't want it to be your 12 bar blues. I wanted it to be like the original blues where there was no, there was no form to it. It was really about a feeling. And so Russell Malone was the perfect person to have for that --great guitarist, and he's from the South as well. So it was just a lot of fun. We just kind of went in. I told him my idea and we laid it. I think we laid down two takes and that was it.

Jo Reed:  Throughout your career you continue this exploration of family history through music particularly in Reverse Thread and then Southern Comfort. These are real histories in music.

Regina Carter: You know, early on, dealing with record companies, the A & R people would always say "well, we need a story. What's your story?" And my very first record on Verve was entitled Rhythms of the Heart, which doesn't really say anything.  You know, you have to make a story out of that. And it was all music and all styles that I enjoyed playing. I didn't want it to be, I didn't want that record on Verve to put me in a box. So musically, I was kind of all over the map, as people would say. So Rhythms of the Heart had different types of tunes. And sometimes I'm like a kid in a candy store when I'm thinking about a project: I chase the shiny things, you know. 2 seconds, I'm here, oh, I'm going to do this, and then another second, I'm over here, and  so I have to really make myself focus. And I remember I decided I wanted to do a record and trace my family history. I had done ancestry test on Ancestry.com.  And I knew about my mother's side of the family, pretty much. knew my aunts and uncles on my father's side, but I never, and I knew my grandmother, but I didn't know anything about my father's father, except he was a coal miner. I didn't really know anything about him. So I said, I'm going to do research to see where did he live? What year did he grow up? What was the music that was happening? And he came up in the Appalachian region. So there was music from Africans, the Native Americans, Scots, Irish, all of this mixed in together to create this beautiful Americana sound, if you will. I did a lot of research:  different libraries, listening libraries, sites. I think I spent probably two years researching and working on this record and coming up with repertoire. And then I would I would play live somewhere and say: okay, no, I need to change this instrument or I want this. And after I recorded that record, when it was being mastered, when my mom passed in 2005, I moved all her stuff to Jersey and I had a couple of boxes in our house.  And I finally said, okay, these boxes have got to go. And I opened up the one box: and there was a sheet she put together with all of the siblings and my grandparents’ pictures on it. So this is my first time seeing my grandfather. And I thought that was, like I don't believe in coincidence, you know, I felt that was perfect timing for Southern Comfort.

Jo Reed:   And that Southern comfort, jazz, traditional music and in more jazz merged together so beautifully with Appalachian and Cajun fiddle tunes and mean folk songs. What an album it was!. And “Cornbread Crumbled In Gravy”, that just stays with me. Tell me why you chose to put that on. And thank you for doing that. I love that song.

Regina Carter: A lot of the tunes that I recorded on Southern Comfort were from field recordings that I had heard and “Cornbread Crumbled In Gravy”,  just the voice, it was just a recording of a woman singing. And it was just something that touched me so deep inside with that song. I felt like I have to do this song. And it was so interesting because one night we were playing in a club, playing music from the CD, and there was a busload of tourists that came in and one woman came up to me and she said, “I know that melody. My mom used to sing it to me when I was little, but the words are different.” And so it's just one of those things how you can see how music and art travels and how connected we are. And going back to Reverse Thread, sometimes I'm listening to music, you know, from different parts of the continent of Africa and I'd say: "oh, that sounds like this music here." We're all connected. So I just said we're all a piece of one fabric. And if you start to pull that string and unravel us, that's humanity. That's who we are.

Jo Reed: The violin is a very misunderstood instrument. It's revered. You've said people regard it as precious, and yet it is an instrument that has played through so many cultures around the world. This most revered of classical instruments is a world instrument.

Regina Carter: Right. Right. If you look at every culture of, of music across the globe, almost every culture has an instrument that's either a violin, fiddle or something from which the violin came out of whether it's an Endingidi, which is the violins used in Uganda or the Ganges fiddles, one string with the bow. In every culture, there's Indian classical music, or there folk music, like you said, every culture has a music that that violin or something similar to violin is used in. And, it's funny when I'm doing workshops sometimes with children and their parents will say, don't you think it's important that, you know, students start off playing classical music? And I said, whose classical music? Because every culture has its own classical music. As long as you learn how to play the instrument, you learn the technique of it, you can learn that playing anything. I see a lot of my students and friends that play Irish fiddle music or American fiddle. I feel like they have a much better bow arm than a lot of European classical players, at least a lot better than mine. I feel like they're very fluid with their bow arms. I tell people it's a piece of wood with strings on it. And so I try to approach the violin with that in mind: and not stuck in the limitations of what someone said this instrument is supposed to be able to do.

Jo Reed: Well, speaking of violin and the mystic violin, you actually had the experience of playing Paganini's violin called "The Cannon" in 2001, and you were the first jazz artist to play it. How did this happen?

 Regina Carter: Many years ago, actually, right before 911, a good friend of ours was visiting from Genoa-- Andreas Lieberovici,--he was listening to a recording of a rehearsal I had done. and Andreas said: Oh, this would be great for you to do a concert in Genoa and using Paganini's violin. Which I thought, Well, this will never happen. But he was excited about it. I didn't even give it a second thought. in fact, when he went to the mayor of Genoa, who was a jazz fan, the mayor immediately said, yes, but the violin, Paganini's violin, the Guarneri del Gesu, it belongs to the community in Genoa. And there was this long interview process. Some folks thought it was a great idea. Some people were totally against it: saying playing jazz on this instrument, would devalue it and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. So finally we got the okay and I went over to Genoa. And the promoter, the night before, a bunch of us had gone out to dinner and he's telling us only a few tickets have sold and if we don't sell more tickets, we have to pay for the hall. So my friend scheduled a press conference the next day and I held the press conference and they said, well play something. So the first thing that came to my mind was “Amazing Grace,” which was one of my mother's favorite tunes. And I'm going to play this to soothe all that's going on inside of me. They sold out all the tickets. The hall was packed.  And it was just an amazing concert. People came and they loved the concert.

Jo Reed: And what playing on the actual violin, was it an adjustment? Could you hear the difference in sound?

Regina Carter: This violin is priceless. I had to go to a specific place to practice on the violin. And every violin is very different. The size, the strings, the shifting. And I tell people, it's like knowing how to get around your bedroom in the dark and then someone going in and changing all the furniture around and didn't tell you. So you have to learn. And two days is not a lot of time to learn. But I knew what I could and couldn't do on that instrument and it was much bigger than mine. When the violin came, it came with a whole line of police escorts. I thought, Oh, wow, the Pope's in town. You know, it's just they were bringing the violin. The room I was in had these red velvet curtains which they snatched closed. And I, I just remember being petrified, playing this instrument. John Clayton, again, said try music from the French Impressionist period because a lot of times the chords are more modern and easier to improvise over.

Jo Reed: You also actually made a CD with that violin called Paganini After a Dream, which is a  beautiful CD.

Regina Carter: They, the community of Genoa gave me permission to record an album. It was funny. My friend Andrea said, You might as well record a record. And I said, I think you're pushing it now, you know? They said yes once, leave it alone. But they said yes again. I picked some of the same tunes that we played on the concert there. But again, a lot of the French impressionist tunes by them, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel. Just trying to pick tunes that were easy enough for me to navigate on that violin.

Jo Reed: You were given a MacArthur Award in 2006, which had to have been a red letter day for you.

Regina Carter: Mm hmm. yeah.  You know. After I got married in 2004, six months later my mom was gone. And she made her transition, yeah, Six months after we got married and I spent her last couple of months with her in the hospital, I just stayed there with her. And it was a life changing experience for several reasons, just watching that process. And then I played music, sometimes when she couldn't communicate, I put music on and I could see how her vital signs would change one day. And I'd know, take that off and put something else on. But, while she was still here, I was supposed to play a big festival and in another country. And I kept asking her, doctor, "is she going to be here when I get back?" And he'd always say, "I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know." And so I think three days before I was supposed to leave, the doctor said, "she won't be here when you get back." And I knew then I'm not going. And so we called my agent and manager, and they called the festival. And the festival producer said, "You're full of blank and we're going to sue your blank." And they did. And the thing is, is that the contract was not written properly. They had left the Inc. off of my business name. And so if you leave LLC or Inc. off, they can sue you personally so that now they can come after my stuff and my husband's, because I just got married. So I was freaking out and they were trying to deal. And I said, “Can I bury my mother and have like just a minute before we start dealing with this?” And I remember calling all kinds of attorneys and attorneys in that country wouldn't touch it. And finally, I found someone that helped me and we settled. And I was so bitter after that. I was bitter. I just thought, how could someone in the music business be that cold and callous? And I didn't want to play anymore. And it was because of John Clayton who said, “if you don't play anymore, you've let them win.” So I'm going through this whole thing grieving my mother, having to go back to Detroit. I was holding on to her house just because I needed time. And the lawsuit was settled. And two days later, I got the call from the MacArthur Foundation. And if they had called me before, these people would have gotten that money. It had just consumed my life. I felt like that was my mother, that was my green light that then the sun came out. And it completely changed my life. It would have completely changed my life regardless, but because of all I had just gone through for an entire year, it was the sun I needed.

Jo Reed:   Obviously, there's a great financial benefit that comes with that. And I wonder what that gave you the room to do other than take a breath, which clearly you needed to do.

Regina Carter: Yeah. The gift from the MacArthur: I needed to take a break and breathe. I needed to have time to really grieve and I needed to figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted I didn't want to go out on tour anymore. I just needed time to find myself, find my footing. And I thought I wanted to go to school to become a music therapist. And I talked to several music therapists and they said, one said, "you know, before you jump in, take an intro to music therapy course first." So I interviewed at several schools and Western University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They didn't have an online course; they set one up specifically for me. So it wasn't online. It was long-distance learning. They would give me my assignments, I'd load them up, and then a couple of times a year I'd have to fly to Michigan and spend time there, either being tested or following different music therapists around. And one of the therapists I followed worked in hospice, and I thought it was just such a beautiful gift --not only giving to the people that are making their transition, but what you get from the person that's making that transition. And I knew then that's what I wanted to do. So I became a hospice volunteer. I trained and I had a couple of patients. I saw them in their homes for a couple of years until they all passed away. And then I didn't do that anymore because I was traveling so much and it wasn't fair, I felt, to leave and be gone for three, four weeks and not be able to see my patients. Although no matter where I was, I called them when I was on the road and just talked to them and told them what was going on. And I think in the West, we don't really deal with that. We don't talk about it. We don't want it. It's very uncomfortable, where other cultures celebrate it. It's a part of living. And so, after many years, I decided I wanted to train and become an end of life doula.

But I jumped way ahead. But with the MacArthur, let me take a moment, take a U-turn. So with the MacArthur, I went to school and became a hospice, a hospice volunteer, and just took some time and then decided on the next record, which was: Reverse Thread. And I shopped to the label because I owned it. I wasn't with the label and I shopped it and I told my manager at the time I said, "whoever takes this record, they have to take it as is." No changes. And it's funny how things work. Chuck Mitchell was at Verve. He was one of the main reasons I was signed to Verve and he was leaving. He said, make sure she stays and take good care of her. And I always wanted to work with him and so many, many years later. I shopped it to a label where he was and he took it just as it was, and he said, "listen, I'm not a musician, but here's a suggestion” You think about it. It's your record." His suggestion made total sense. And so I was with him and then he and he went to another label. The next record I made. So I used the money to start investing in myself and in my records so that I could own the Masters. And that's something I learned from folks like Dee Dee Bridgewater and Abbey Lincoln, it's own your masters.

Jo Reed: You cut your record. And then when you go out and tour. Are you opening up those records as you're performing them live? I'm just curious about the relationship between the live performance of the record in front of an audience and what happens in the studio.

Regina Carter: When recording records in a studio, its,  it can be a little intense. You don't want songs to be too long: you know, you're thinking about radio play. Can it be played on radio? How long is the tune?   Different things you have to think about. And so when you're playing, when I'm playing live, those tunes definitely open up. People can take longer solos. Someone will do something different that sparks something else, that becomes exciting, so it changes over time. And maybe a year or two later, if I have a sub in the band, and I'm sending them the music and I look at the charts, I'm like, "  this is what we recorded, but we don't even do this anymore." So it can be difficult to like, but that's the beauty of playing live, and the energy that you get back from an audience when you're playing. I feel like audiences are part of what we do. We're not playing at them. They're actually involved. We need we need that energy.

Regina Carter: Well, that leads me back to your work with hospice and in playing for the people who were making that transition and the healing power of music that you alluded to. And I would like to have you speak more to that, but also wonder if you feel that same kind of, I don't know, healing power or spirit when you're performing not in a hospice situation, but live in front of an audience.

Regina Carter: When I'm performing live, it's an amazing feeling. And especially when the group can lock in as one and you go into this other space, I don't even know. It's like we can communicate without words. And as I've gotten older I think I play more with intention. What is it that I'm trying to say or get across. It is not just playing notes to get people to react, but playing something to hopefully get someone to feel something. I want to feel. I want the band to feel. I want them to feel. And I think working as a hospice volunteer helps me to get in touch with that. And so I try to be centered and say, "what is it that I'm trying to say?" I'm not trying to necessarily wow you. I'm trying to convey an emotion.   I can't control how people accept, but I'm giving a gift. And I don't feel like it's mine. I feel like that God is working through me or my higher power. That if I can get out of the way, and let that come through, that's the real gift.

Jo Reed: I cannot not talk about you and Kenny Barron and your album Free Fall. That was back 2001, I think. That was like a conversation between two brilliant instrumentalists. And I would just love a little background on that.  

Regina Carter: I met Kenny Barron, 2010 NEA Jazz Master and Pianist, I met him years ago. I was playing with a group at the Telluride Jazz Festival, and he and Malina Shaw came up to the stage and introduced themselves. And Kenny said, "I want to play with you one day." And I, before I could even catch myself, I said, "Yeah, right." And so, we always laugh [laughter]. And I just thought, "Oh, he's just being polite, you know?" And many, many years later, we talked about it and I played some gigs with him not just duo, but sometimes with his group. And it just seemed like we had a connection, just a very natural musical connection. And so when we finally were able to, our schedules matched up, and we were able to record this record, we just got together once and we both brought a list of tunes that we liked. And so we went through and we just kind of play through them quickly and say: oh, that works, this works, this works. So we just and we spent two days in the studio just going through that list, playing them so we could make a decision after that. It was just an incredible time in the studio. I was so comfortable. Kenny Barron is just like a lake. He's just such a calm and wonderful human being. And I've learned so much. I consider him a mentor. I, I watched him and learned so much not only from his playing, but just how he reacts or doesn't react in certain situations, which is a huge lesson.

Regina Carter: Ella FitzGerald is an important musical influence on you. What about Ella inspires you?

Regina Carter: When I was a child growing up in Detroit, I remember there were some albums in one of the closets and one was a record by Ella. I had no idea who she was, but I would just put these albums on. Ella took me to another place --a very calm place. And it was like it was like when a mother sings to her child. And I just loved hearing her voice. Of course, when I was introduced to jazz and started getting into the music and learning about all these people, and it seemed like on several records I would always choose an Ella tune to record. And so it was time for me to record a record, and I was like, ugh, I don't know what I want to do. And I was talking to Carla Cooke and she says, Well, you love Ella. Why don't you do a tribute record to her? And I said, that's a perfect idea-- not realizing that it was her 100th birthday that was coming up. And I knew that so many vocalists would probably be doing tribute records to Ella. But here I am. I'm not a vocalist. I'm a violinist. So because I knew so many people would do tribute records, I wanted to choose tunes that weren't as popular. You know, back in the day, you get an album, you had Side A, you flip it over and you had Side B, and so I called it a B-side record--tunes like "Crying in the Chapel," "Judy," which I could not find a recording of Ella singing that. But "Judy" that's how she won the night at the Apollo. And that put her on the map...

Jo Reed:  I’m so glad you mentioned "Judy" for a second because it's uncanny how much your violin sounds like a voice.

(music up)

Jo Reed: You mentioned teaching and we haven't talked about your teaching because your commitment to teaching is deep and it's broad. Why is this such an important part of your life?

Regina Carter: When I was a child, my mom was a kindergarten teacher, and sometimes I would go to school with her instead of my own school and I would help out or I'd watch her. And as most children, I would imitate her. At home, I'd set up my room like a classroom. But I swore, though, I would never teach. I think seeing my mom come home after teaching and it drains you. If you're a good teacher is a lot of energy. But lo and behold, you know, I think the tradition, the tradition that I got from Marcus Belgrave and so many other musicians in Detroit, it's just naturally in me to pass along the knowledge. And I actually enjoy it when I start working with students, I get really excited, especially if they want to learn.   I get really excited by it. And I think it's important to pass on the tradition not only of jazz, but just another having another perspective about music, why you're playing music. And I always try to educate them a little bit about the business of music, because that's the one thing that I don't know any university or college that offers a business course for musicians, and that should be mandatory.

Jo Reed: I know we're running out of time, but your latest project is so intriguing to me. “Gone in a Phrase of Air. “

[01:41:16] Regina Carter: That is a continuation of another piece I wrote some years back about Black Bottom, where my mother grew up in Detroit, and areas like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were areas where blacks and immigrants were forced to live. Some of the homes were funky and old. Some were really beautiful. And, you know, most people own their own businesses, really tight knit communities. And Robert Moses said, if you want to get rid of these funky neighborhoods, just run a highway through these and then you can destroy these neighborhoods, which is what happened in 1956. Highway Act was signed. And I-75 in Detroit was put through in my mother's community, where she grew up. And most of those people were not compensated for their homes and businesses and they were moved into projects or other places. And I thought this would be a great project. And so a dear friend of mine, a poet, Leslie Reese, her grandmother, grew up in Black Bottom. And so Leslie interviewed all these people that had grown up in Black Bottom, and she turned some of their stories into like a tapestry. And I composed music to that. During that research, I found that it didn't just happen in Detroit, but it happened in almost every urban city across the United States. And so I was inspired to keep researching that and writing music and adding photographs, showing some of these neighborhoods. And it's still happening. Redlining. And so many people don't know about this, even adults, and they don't know that it's still going on. And so I continued this project and "Gone in a Phrase of Air" is a title from Leslie Reece. She put it on one of her and one of the pieces, her black bottom. And she said, "I know some of these neighborhoods were old and funky, but they just tore them down, gone in a phrase of air, just like they were never even there."

Jo Carter: It's such a resonant title and such an important project. Thank you for doing that.

You have been awarded through your career, the trifecta: the Doris Duke Award, now you're named an NBA Jazz Master. And I do wonder what being named a jazz master means for you.

Regina Carter: Being named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts is still mind-blowing. In my mind, it's for someone that's lived a lot longer and had more experience. But I think in my head I'm still a kid. And then my body says, "No, you're not." But it's such a huge honor. And you know, sometimes when you're working, you're doing what you do, you get so caught up in the every day. And when you get, when you're recognized by something this prestigious, it's like someone's saying you're doing okay. You're doing what you're supposed to do. Keep going. Keep going. It helps it helps me to keep going and to know that my music hopefully my music obviously is touching some people. It is. And that's what I want. And. It just encourages me to keep creating.

Jo Reed: Well, thank you. Thank you for giving me your time. Congratulations on this award. Thank you. So well-deserved. I couldn't be happier.

Regina Carter: I so appreciate that. Really. Thank you. Thank you.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

That was violinist and 2023 NEA Jazz Master Regina Carter. Regina Carter and the other 2023Jazz Masters were celebrated at a fabulous tribute concert on April 1 at the Kennedy Center. If you didn’t make it or you were there and want to experience it again—you can find it at arts.gov.  

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

 

Jo Reed:. From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed

In December, President Biden named Tsione Wolde-Michael executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH).  Before we talk about Tsione, let me you a little about PCAH.  After a five year hiatus, PCAH was reestablished by President Biden this past fall.  It’s an advisory board that counsels the White House on cultural issues engaging the nation’s artists, humanities scholars, and cultural heritage practitioners on ways to promote excellence in the arts, the humanities, and museum and library services and demonstrate their relevance to the country’s health, economy, equity, and civic life.

Tisone Wolde-Michael is a public historian with a track record of bringing diverse and previously unheard voices into the public forum. Tsione comes to PCAH as the founder and director of the Center for Restorative History, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She had previously worked as part of the inaugural staff at the National Museum of African American History and Culture where among her duties, she helped curate its first major exhibit “Slavery and Freedom.” Tsione is the first African-American, first historian, and youngest person to direct PCAH. Although its early days yet, and the rest of the committee has yet to be named, choosing Tsione Wolde-Michael as director of PCAH is an important indicator of the centrality of the arts and humanities to the Biden administration. We wanted you to know more about her, her work and her thinking about PCAH.   And that’s where I began my conversation with Tsione Wolde-Michael.

Jo Reed:. Well, first of all, congratulations at being named the Executive Director of PCAH.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Thank you so much.

Jo Reed:  Tsione, I described PCAH in very broad strokes….I wonder if you can fill in some of the details.

Tsione Wolde-Michael:  Sure. I think it's important to go into the history of PCAH, a bit. It was founded in 1982, by executive order, and its purpose was to advise the President--and, by extension, the White House-- on cultural policy. And there has been a strong legacy of direct engagement with the First Lady, who historically has served as honorary chair of the committee, and the committee is comprised of 25 private members who are appointed by the President. And these are prominent artists, scholars, philanthropists, people who have demonstrated a serious commitment to the arts and the humanities. There are also public members, and those are represented by the heads of key federal agencies and institutions that have a very vital role in culture. So, that includes the chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Librarian of Congress, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and that's just among many others. And the goal has always been to advance critical work through direct policy recommendations to the President, to facilitate public-private partnerships, and promote interagency cooperation, and that's really across the federal government. And the way that that's historically been done has been by proposing programs that enhance support for the arts and humanities-- also, museums and library services-- really, across the country. So, PCAH has worked on issues in education and cultural diplomacy, and the creative economy, too. The committee has a history of issuing important policy reports, primarily on the state of the arts, and also finding ways to really catalyze federal programs, and it's done this over the past 40 years.

Jo Reed: Can you give me some examples of the initiatives PCAH has spearheaded in the past?

Tsione Wolde-Michael:  Sure.  Examples of some of the past work of PCAH that would be familiar to folks include the “Save America's Treasures” program; “Film Forward”, which was through Sundance; and then, of course, the very beloved National Student Poets Program. “Turnaround Arts” was also another big initiative that was piloted, right here in Washington, D.C., as well. And so, those are just a few of the examples of past special initiatives that PCAH put forward, and it offered these programs, right? But it also did work beyond that. So, it worked as convener to host summits, and also produce really high-profile events that help to address gaps in the field. Now, that's a-- <laughs> that's a long history of PCAH, right?

Jo Reed: It is, and I know President Biden's executive order, reinstituting PCAH, actually expands its mission and the reach of PCAH, doesn't it?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: That's right. So, in September of last year, after a five-year hiatus, President Biden issued a new executive order establishing PCAH, and the charge of this new iteration of PCAH remains much the same to the previous iteration. You know, its work is to really engage the nation's artists, humanities scholars, and cultural heritage practitioners on ways to promote excellence in the arts and humanities, and of course museums and library services. And also, as you mentioned, it's an incredibly expansive understanding of the reach of the arts and humanities, and it extends it to areas thinking about how arts and humanities can impact areas like public health, economic development; thinking about civic life; even thinking about climate change, for instance. So, it's a really exciting time for the arts and humanities to have PCAH back, and, as you mentioned, this new executive order really bolsters the mission of PCAH in ways that I think are very encouraging.

Jo Reed: Well, let's talk a little bit about you right now. Tell me where you were born and raised, and just a little bit about you.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Sure. So, I was born and raised in the Twin Cities, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I was born in Minneapolis, but I love both <laughs> of the cities just the same. I was born to immigrant parents who came to the United States from Ethiopia, and I'm the youngest of six children, the only U.S.-born child. And the Twin Cities are really this dynamic and funky and lively place to grow up, and of course it helped to foster my love for the humanities and the arts. This is a place where there are so many amazing grassroots efforts on the ground, phenomenal museums, really dynamic community-based theaters, and it's a part of, really, what made me, and what raised me.

Jo Reed: Well, you're an historian, and I'm curious what attracted you to the study of history, and public history, because that's really where you've made your mark.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Yeah. So, I initially started off doing work in women's studies, so that's feminist theory, and I really felt like a lot of my modes of argumentation and questioning were pushing me to ask questions about origin stories, which is really what brought me to history. So, I tell people I am interested in history because I'm interested in understanding the present. And I did my graduate studies at Harvard University, which is a place that really trains you to go into the academy. But I knew early on that my work really needed a public; that I wanted to not just write articles that were going to be read by highly specialized scholars and just a handful of folks in the field, but work that would be transformative and that could connect to broad and diverse publics. And so that's what really opened me up to the world of public history, the world of museums, and that's where my career ultimately led me.

Jo Reed: Well, you certainly began <laughs> your early career with a bang, at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, and you started there before the building was even built. So, you helped develop the collections and its inaugural exhibit, Slavery and Freedom. I would love to hear about that experience from you, of watching this building rise up on the Mall, and help curate such an important exhibit.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Yeah, that's right. So, I like to say that I am the product of black museums. I spent my career as a public historian launching these large-scale projects from the ground up, and that all started at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where I was part of the inaugural staff, working to really transform understandings of our nation's past, and tell the American story through the African American lens at a national level for the first time, in this kind of robust and comprehensive way. And so, the Smithsonian is an odd place to cut your teeth. It's unusual, and I started there under the direction of now-Secretary Lonnie Bunch, where I worked with a small curatorial team over six years. It was very much a startup culture. And so we were out in the field, and scrappy, and working based in communities, to amass this collection from scratch, and we did that by building strong ties through what we call, in the field, community-based collecting. So, really, learning local histories, respecting local knowledges, and making sure that they rise to the fore, in terms of the type of national storytelling that we've done. And I should mention, sometimes these are stories that have yet to be captured by scholarship. And, as you mentioned, that work went into creating the museum's largest and foundational exhibit, Slavery and Freedom. Once the museum was open, the question was, "Okay, well, now all of the exhibits are set. What is our work, out in the world?"  "What is our work, beyond the four walls of the museum?" And so, I pivoted to managing some of the international projects, particularly those in Africa, documenting and recovering objects from slave ship wrecks, and working with colonial art-and-history museums to really reinterpret their collections in ways that were more relevant to African publics. This was obviously very special for me, being part of the African diaspora, having the opportunity to work with State Department, being detailed to the African Union, and advising on cultural heritage and preservation work that was happening across the continent, and also thinking about how these elements could be applied to areas like economic development through creative sectors. So, it was a really exciting and formative way to start my career.

Jo Reed: I would think so. Can you just tell me what you thought when that museum first opened, and people from across the country-- around the world-- walked in and saw those exhibits?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: You know, I always joke with folks that I am glad that, during the process, I wasn't thinking about how broad and large the reception would be, because we were already feeling the pressure <laughs> of telling this story that hadn't really been told on the national stage in this way. But when I was a part of those opening ceremonies, and I saw whole communities, church groups, family reunions bus up in these massive buses from all over the country, just to be able to not just see the museum opening, but to finally feel like they had a home on the National Mall, that's just something special and that I don't think I can fully put into words.

Jo Reed: You mentioned your work recovering objects from slave ship wrecks which is the museum’s Slave Wrecks Project. I’m interested in hearing more about the project

Tsione Wolde-Michael: So, this is a massive project that was based in Mozambique, Senegal, and South Africa, and in part was tracking a slave ship that had been wrecked, called the São José, which wrecked off the coast of South Africa, was a Portuguese slave ship en route from Mozambique Island to Maranhão, Brazil. And this project was really searching for objects that the world had never seen before, which were these archaeological fragments that came from what were once in the hulls of slave ships. And in particular, we were looking for those objects that we might be able to showcase in the Middle Passage section. Now, the work that we did, though, was collaborating with African terrestrial and maritime archaeologists, and building up an entire field. So, just to put it into context, there were more studies of bogs in Europe than there were of the transatlantic slave trade, at the time that we started this project, and the transatlantic slave trade is arguably the most important maritime event in human history. And part of that was because there just wasn't this critical mass of African maritime archaeologists to do the work, so you have to build up the field, and that was precisely what this project was about. Yes, objects and the material culture were a component of it, but it was really about building up the field, working with museums on the ground, many of which were working to reinterpret colonial collections, and thinking about how to build a network and to preserve these objects and stories.

Jo Reed: And you actually became a certified diver..

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Yes, I actually did the--

Jo Reed: ... so you can see the ships?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I did, yeah. So, I actually did the diving. We had not just the archaeologists trained to do the diving, but also local community members, as well. So, on Mozambique Island, there's an amazing group of folks who have volunteered to monitor one of the sites. These are sites that are often vulnerable for folks that will come in and try to steal precious historical objects and sell them on the black market. And so, these are brave community leaders who have chosen to take the initiative, and wanted to steward their own cultural heritage. And so I trained with them, along with the archaeologists, as well, to be able to do that work.

Jo Reed: Amazing. Just amazing. And you mentioned working with Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, focusing on public history. And I read that you were working with them on the way colonial collections are interpreted, and I was really interested in that. Can you tell me a little bit more?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Sure. So, oftentimes, in colonial perspectives and museums, and we still see this on plantation sites today, a focus on looking at the beautiful craftsmanship, instead of actually telling a story that humanizes the people who were in bonded labor, and forced to make those beautiful crafts or objects that you're looking at, right? Even people who have the best of intentions, and who wanted to be able to tell those stories, would lament and say, "Well, we just don't have enough first-person accounts," or, "We don't have enough objects to tell those stories." But, really, if you take a look at one object, and you flip it, you definitely can tell those stories. So, for one example, in a museum on Mozambique Island looking at this beautifully crafted cradle for a baby which was used by the slaveholders to put their children in, and that was an object that was slave-made. And so, you can tell a story that thinks about, what does it mean for a person to have to first develop a craft; secondly, create this beautiful object, and do so knowing that they can't provide the same amount of care to their own child. Certainly, having to create this piece would take time: time that they would've spent away from their own children, as well. And so it gives you kind of a different angle to look at the same object, but tell a different story: one that's more inclusive, and also more relevant to the publics who are actually engaging with it on a day-to-day basis.

Jo Reed: Well, you became the founding director of the Center for Restorative History, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.  What is restorative history?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I'm happy that you asked that. Restorative history is a theory and methodology that my colleagues and I put forward at the National Museum of American History, and I'll give you some background on how we arrived at it, and also what it is. So, I think I came to the National Museum of American History at a really dynamic time. It was trying to really thoughtfully revamp its public image, as being an incredibly inclusive institution, whereas I think the public reputation was one that it didn't have that kind of diversity, in terms of its collections, or what was actually on the floor. And I think I also came at this moment when a lot of museums were pivoting to say, "Oh, we're going to do social justice work," but they did so without having a real accounting of the harms that they had participated in. And it goes back to kind of the truth and reconciliation work. You can't have reconciliation without truth-telling first. And so, the Center for Restorative History was a way of institutionalizing and implementing that work that was focused on redress. So, redress, I see, is both a noun and a verb. It's a practice and a process, and it means to really set things as right as possible, as defined by historically harmed communities. And what restorative history does is it builds on the principles of restorative justice practice, and it works with historically harmed communities to, first, identify what the historical harm was; identify, secondly, what their present needs are; and, thirdly, to discuss what the institution's obligation is to the community. And those are key principles of restorative justice practice, but what restorative history does is it also address one critical gap that restorative justice practitioners readily admit that they struggle with, and that's to have a serious examination of root causes. And it's a unique intervention, of course, for the field of public history, because looking at root causes, and doing so through the study of history, is exactly what our purpose is. And so, the center's work was really to redress these exclusions in our national story, engaging with communities that have historically been harmed, and using these principles of restorative justice to center the knowledge and the expertise of communities, and to work with them to create projects and products that didn't just document their histories, but also address their present needs, and help to make history, especially at the national level, more accurate and inclusive.

Jo Reed:  Can you an example of some of the programs you worked on at the Center. I think it might us to understand how restorative history works in practice.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: The work of the Center for Restorative History involved a variety of programs. Some of the projects that we have include the “Undocumented Organizing Collecting Initiative,” which is a multiyear collecting initiative that works across six sites, most of which are in the United States-- North Carolina, California, Nebraska, Chicago, D.C.-- and Mexico City, to really document this incredible movement of undocumented organizers who, despite not having citizenship or voting rights, are actually working to change national policy. And there's only a few moments in history where people without citizenship or voting rights have actually done that. We've also created an internship program for formally incarcerated adults. It's the first of its kind, at any museum or public history institution in the country, and it really creates a pipeline for communities that have historically been excluded from the museum field, to gain that kind of professional experience, but also to add to our knowledge and perspectives of the work that we're doing. There's also the “Reckoning with Remembrance” Project, which was both an exhibit and public program, and includes ongoing work with the rural community of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and that work was to really highlight a community's effort to preserve Emmett Till's memory. And they did so, really, at great risk to their personal safety. And it's also a story that connects the history of Till to the ongoing fight against anti-black violence. And so that project, as all of the center's projects-- these are just a few-- really pushes the boundaries of museum practice; so, really questioning things like co-curation, for instance. So, what are the boundaries of shared authority? Who has the final say in terms of determining what goes on the museum floor? What words appear on museum script, what location is chosen-- those were all things that we did: fully co-curated with the community, with them having final authority. And we're really proud that we did that.  It also rethinks the idea of ownership, which is really about a lot of the legal bounds of museum practice, and also consent. When we think about oral histories, at what point does a person have the consent to retract statements? These are all things that change the power dynamic, as well, when you're engaging with large institutions and communities that have experienced harm, in many cases by either the very institution or the broader profession.

Jo Reed: You have such a rich and varied career as a public historian. Why did you want to take on the role as Executive Director of PCAH?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: You know, I think it's a natural extension of the work, and where my career has been building to, and I think the most compelling part about being Executive Director of the President's Committee of the Arts and Humanities is the opportunity for impact. First, my career, as I mentioned, has really been founded on starting these large-scale projects from the ground up. And so what better opportunity, and what better time, to help reinstitute PCAH, and to do so under such a broad executive order that really highlights the importance of marginalized communities and their voices; spotlights equity, as well; and touches on these important areas of how the arts and humanities can also help promote public-private partnerships and interagency cooperation, but in ways that make the work more effective, and also have more meaningful impact on the ground. Those are the things that motivate me the most, in coming to this position.

Jo Reed: Are there any key takeaways that you can bring from your previous experiences to your work at PCAH?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Yeah. I think that the themes of truth-telling, and bringing marginalized voices into public dialogue, and the importance of justice work, and also recommending policies based on the stated needs of communities on the ground, not through a top-down model, those are things that are not just interests for me. Those, I think, are a fundamental part of the tradition of black museums that raised me. And I think that, as I lead strategy and engagement for PCAH, of course, while working in concert with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities, all of these things are front of mind, and are highly applicable to the work of PCAH.

Jo Reed: You are the first African American to head PCAH, you're the first historian to head PCAH, and you're the youngest person to head PCAH. What's the significance of that, do you think?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I think that-- well, <laughs> all of those things together, it's a lot of firsts, right?

Jo Reed: A lot of firsts. We got three in one sentence.

<both laugh>

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I think that each come with their own significance. You know, obviously, it's a privilege to be making all of those firsts. I think, to be the first black individual leading PCAH is an incredible opportunity, but it's also timely. And I would say the same is true for being the youngest person to lead PCAH. This is a period of time where we have seen young people make their voices heard, and show that they have a strong vision for leadership, politically, and also in the realm of arts and humanities. And so it's a real privilege to be able to represent those interests and concerns, in my direction of PCAH. Of course, as the first African American, it's timely, as I mentioned, but I also think aligns very nicely with the administration's interest in equity, and diversity, and representation of historically marginalized groups, as well. And I hope to be able to, again, ensure that those perspectives are represented in PCAH's work, as well. And being a historian and someone who comes from the field, I think, is really important, and it's why I see the work of PCAH not just working parallel to the three major cultural agencies that I mentioned, but it's really about thinking about how to better coordinate, how to integrate that work, and how to make sure that it's showing up on the ground, in really important ways, and using PCAH to bolster the existing work that folks are already doing on the ground, and kind of mechanizing it in that way, across the agencies.

Jo Reed: How do you see the relationship between history and the arts?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Yeah, I really appreciate that question. I think that history and humanities, in general, can serve as an anchor for the arts; and arts, in turn, offers a creative and imaginative vehicle to think about potential futures when we think about how it relates to humanities. And so, it's a dialectic, and I see the two as being equally important to the other.

Jo Reed: And PCAH is coming back into existence during a difficult time for the arts sector, that's still reeling from the pandemic, and during this long-overdue racial reckoning and a burgeoning of new conversations. And I wonder if and how you see PCAH responding to both.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I think that PCAH's work in the arts will inevitably connect to the type of reckoning work that we saw. On the one hand, there's the mandate of this executive order to really think about the ways that PCAH can help invigorate creative industries around the arts, which, in part, is-- you know, so many communities have suffered during the pandemic--, and so it's thinking about how to look at the ways that people have been creatively resilient, and be able to support that, but also think about new initiatives that also might provide those supports. With regard to the public reckoning, I think PCAH has to be responsive to that. We were in an environment where publics around the globe were pushing art, and also history institutions-- truly, across the globe-- to be more relevant to their publics, to have more diversified storytelling, to have diversified staff and hiring practices, and I think the work of PCAH supports the progressive direction of the field in that way.

Jo Reed: You've had so much experience as a public historian, dealing with arts and humanities, and I would like you to talk about just some of the ways you've seen the arts and humanities contribute to a more just and equitable society.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Sure. As I mentioned, I really see humanities as an anchor. It allows us to reflect critically on our past, and to understand it with a depth that really helps us make sense of our present moment. And so, I think humanities and humanities-based projects have always been at the forefront, though not always recognized as such, in helping to really educate and to shift the narrative in ways that are important and incredibly productive. I think, on the arts side, as I mentioned before, art gives us the space to be imaginative, and to think about our futures. I've loved the recent revival in thinking about Afrofuturism. I think it's an example of some really exciting, but also productive, work that allows us to simultaneously think about aspects of the past that are little known, or have yet to be unearthed, while also thinking about speculative futures in a way that's exciting, and that allows us to think beyond the bounds of traditional disciplines, or even what we think might be possible. And that's really what I see as the potential of the arts.

Jo Reed: And then, finally, why is PCAH so important? What do you think, finally, its significance is?

Tsione Wolde-Michael: I think PCAH has this unique function.  It has a mandate to work across federal government, and there's really no other entity that has the opportunity to work with almost every single department <laughs> of federal government and agencies, to really think about how we can be creative in reviving work on the arts and humanities, and supporting it in ways that are sustainable, long term. You know, the arts and humanities have also been in a vulnerable position, and so I think, by having PCAH reconstituted in this way, it is standing on its importance for our democracy; for civic society, as well. And having that strong statement, and such a bold vision in the executive order, in particular, is something that I think is incredibly encouraging.

Jo Reed: Okay, I think that is a great place to leave it. Tsione, thank you so much. I really appreciate you giving me your time.

Tsione Wolde-Michael: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was the executive director of PCAH, Tsione Wolde-Michael. The White House is expected to name the 25 non-federal committee members in the coming weeks. Keep checking arts.gov for updates or follow us on Twitter @NEAarts.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

 

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

Bushra Rehman:  Well, the reason I chose to write something similar to my life is I just feel I have not seen much like this in Western literature about a queer Muslim girl from Queens.  I mean everything about her class background, her queerness and her identity also as a budding artist because really that's what she is. You know, this is a portrait of an artist as a young woman as well. And so all of those aspects, I really wanted to see a book like this in the world and so that's why I wrote it, and I chose this content.

Jo Reed:  That is writer Bushra Rehman talking about her novel “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion” a book  the NY Times called “stunningly beautiful”  and one I think is simply terrific, although there’s nothing simple at it. “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion” is a coming of age story loosely based on Bushra’s own girlhood growing up in a tightly-knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens. Her character Razia is a natural scholar who grows up in a religious household. Though closely supervised by her parents, she still manages to wander the neighborhood engaging in minor rebellions with her closest friend Taslima. Things change for Razia when she’s accepted into the highly selective Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan which broadens her world and slowly opens her up to her own queer identity.  Bushra Rehman is an award-winning poet and teacher and well-known as an outstanding spoken word artist. Her previous books include the novel, “Corona,” and the poetry collection, ”Marianna’s Beauty Salon.” She is also coeditor with Daisy Hernandez of the groundbreaking anthology “Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism.”  Bushra brings a poet’s descriptive language and an editor’s specificity to “Roses In the Mouth of a Lion”.  The novel revolves around family, religion, friendship, and the neighborhood of Corona Queens which is can be seen as a character in and of itself. In fact, Bushra Rehman begins “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion” by introducing us to the Corona, Queens of the 1980s.

Bushra Rehman: “Corona. I'm talking about a little village perched under the Number 7 train in Queens between Junction Boulevard and 111th Street. I'm talking about the Lemon Ice King, Spaghetti Park and PS. 19. The Corona F Scott Fitzgerald called The Valley Of Ashes as the Great Gatsby drove past it on his night of carousal, what me and my own know as home. And we didn't know about any Valley of Ashes because by then it had been topped off our houses. You know, the kind made from brick that’s tan color no self-respecting brick would be at all. That's Corona. And you know the song by Paul Simon the one where he says, ‘I’m my way. I don't know where I'm going. I'm on my way. I'm taking my time and I don't know where. Goodbye to Rosie queen of Corona. See you, me, and Julio down by the Schoolyard.’ Well, at first, I couldn't believe it was Corona he was singing about because why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona? I didn't see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen. And I didn't think Paul Simon had ever been one of those. Then I saw these pictures of him standing in front of one of those tan brick homes. What I thought was a lie was true.”

Jo Reed: That is wonderful. That is the beginning of “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion”, and we are in Corona. What did you want us to know about that neighborhood of Corona at that time?

Bushra Rehman:  Well, so I'm a deep New Yorker, deep New York City kid. And I used to teach poetry to public school children in all the boroughs. And one of the exercises we always did was to celebrate our neighborhoods. And one day I was writing with them, with the kids, and I started writing about my home neighborhood of Corona. And I realized there's so much power in finding the beauty of where we come from. And especially when where we come from is a place that is often misunderstood. It's an under resourced neighborhood. People are afraid to go there. You know? But when you're from that neighborhood, there's so much just life and family and love and community that I really wanted to celebrate in this novel, and specifically my Muslim, my Pakistani Muslim Community that I really wanted to celebrate. And as we know in this country there is a lot of Islamophobia. And I think that what happens is that this Islamophobia makes our communities become more insular, more private, and then it just becomes a loop where then people know less about us. And so this book is really meant to crack that open, you know, to kind of open the door to just bring our stories into public awareness.

Jo Reed:  Razia has such strong and complicated relationships with both her mother and her father. Her father isn't a big presence in the book, but he comes through so clearly as does Razia’s love for him.

Bushra Rehman:  Yeah.  like many of the fathers working multiple jobs, working night jobs, day jobs, like trying at some point to start a business because he thinks it's one way that he could then, you know, continue to be amongst his family and in the neighborhood and run his own business. But because he's so generous, because he's so giving, because he doesn't really ever want to take money from anyone he just wants to feed everyone for free, the business fails. And so, you know, he's a very important figure. And I think it was again, important for me to show a figure of a Muslim man in literature who’s gentle and loving and kind.

Jo Reed:  Well, he certainly is all that. And her mother is formidable. Formidable. Describe their relationship.

Bushra Rehman:  Well, so the mom is really tough. And I find that I often see this happens is the father can get to be the gentle parent, right, and then the mother has to be the tough parent, so that because the kids have to be strong. I mean, they are growing up in a place where they have to be safe. They don't have a lot of money so they have to learn to, you know, fend for themselves. They have to be strong. And the mother has to be strong. And I think she passes this on to her children. And, she passes on her religious training to Razia. And Razia is very spiritual. You know, I am paying homage to books that I loved growing up like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, “Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.” You know? And so it's very much Razia's relationship to Allah is, like, “Are you there, God? It’s me Margaret.” You know, she accepts-- she sees Allah as her ally, you know, as someone who she can talk to you as her therapist or as her best friend. But she's getting all her religious training from her mother. And her mother never grew up in a way where she never learned how to read. And so she really, you know, despite what some of the quote/unquote religious scholars might say in the community she is like “my daughter is going to go to school. My daughter is going to learn how to read.” And although it causes her fear, when her daughter leaves the neighborhood to go to Stuyvesant High School, she still knows that her daughter has a different life path than her as difficult as that is for her to accept.

Jo Reed:  She's also a force within the community.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  She teaches the Quran to other girls in the community. And she steps in when somebody's being abused.  She's quite a force.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes. Yes. You know, the thing about teaching Quran is often that is something that women could do to make money. And when Razia’s grandmother was widowed that's how she supported the family was teaching Quran. And this is how her mother also helps to support the family. And she's very charismatic, very powerful, very charming. And right, she's fierce. She's a fierce woman. And when I think about my own persona as a feminist, I think that I get my powerful ideas of what power and what women's power is from people like Razia’s mother, who there are many women I knew like this growing up.

Jo Reed:  And as you said, religion is so central and Razia’s faith is really important to her. And so we see how that becomes complicated as she's desiring to question some of the rigidity in the way her family practices her faith.

Bushra Rehman:  Yeah. You know, Razia, like many queer children has always felt different. You know? And because it's the ‘80s and because in the ‘80s as we know, queer culture was not mainstream culture, even some of our biggest figures like George Michael who plays a role in the book, there's all these undercover queer figures who are put into the book as well. You know, she doesn't understand why she feels different. She doesn't understand why she doesn't want to get married and other people do. And so when she meets a young woman who she's attracted to and who is also attracted to her she can actually, you know, act on her feelings, but she knows that she has to keep them secret from her family and community. And she's even afraid to tell some of her best friends in the community, too And, you know, I think this is something that isn't just something that happens in Muslim communities. I identify as queer. I have friends from all backgrounds. And it's been a struggle for many of us, especially people my age who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And, you know, we hoped that because of the kind of cultural activism that we've all been involved in for decades that life can be easier for younger queer people now. And I think, as I've been putting this book out, you know, I've been learning more about Islam and queerness, and I have so much to learn, but there's so many scholars and activists who are sharing how, you know, queerness has always been a part of this culture. And, you know, we've always been here, you know, that's the thing. It gets erased over and over again, but we've always existed. You know?

Jo Reed:  Her friendships are so key. And, you know, when you're a teenager, when you're young how important these friendships are to you. Your friendships with other women if you're a girl, especially, they’re just everything. And she has a great partner in crime in Taslima.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes. Yes. I think that friendship-- and I often say this: friendship is proof that there is a benevolent force at work in the universe because, you know, what is friendship? You know, just such a beautiful thing between people.  It's not about money. It's not about prestige. It's just about caring for someone who's not your blood. You know? You choose. They’re your chosen family. And the way I grew up very similar to Razia and I grew up in a Pakistani community in Queens. And at that time, you know, people’s families were still in Pakistan. And so your aunties and uncles were your parents’ friends. And it was wonderful because there was so little drama and so much love. And I think that because of that these girls are also learning that friendship is everything. And friendship is how you survive, and how you build community. You know, literally people would help each other raise their kids, lend each other money. If someone didn't have a place to live they moved into your house.  It was really about survival. Friendship and survival, but then also joy.  And laughter and humor, also, as a survival technique.

Jo Reed:  And I just have to give a big shout-out to Eliza who’s Taslima’s older sister, who is making her own decisions about her life and really tries to set these two girls straight.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes. You know, what I wanted to do in this book was really reflect that it's not a homogeneous-- no culture is homogenous. But every single friend of Razia's is different. Eliza wants to just get out of the neighborhood. Wants to go away to college and never come back. Is reading feminist text. Taslima and Razia are younger and they're not really thinking exactly along those terms. They just want to have fun. Taslima is really into fashion. You know? So she just wants to make her own clothes and wear them out in public and hope she gets noticed. Razia is like a bookworm. So they're all very different from each other but they're thrown together because their parents are friends and so they are friends as well.

Jo Reed:  Well, as we said, Razia gets into Stuyvesant High School, which is a highly selective public school in Manhattan. And that really accelerates some of the changes we are beginning to see. How does she began to change when she gets into Stuyvesant?

Bushra Rehman:  Well, first, I think it's this way that she's always felt different. It's now been noticed. It's been officially noticed that she is different in this way. She goes to the school. She leaves the neighborhood. And she suddenly is in the East Village. At the time Stuyvesant-- it's no longer in the East Village of Manhattan, but it was in the East Village. And this was the East Village of, again, the ‘80s and the ‘90s, like, you know, Lou Reed style East Village where it's very gritty. It's very punk rock. It's very-- and so Razia is seeing all kinds of different people. I mean, obviously, in Queens, she's seeing lots of different people. But she's not seeing what she sees in the East Village of art everywhere, And even, you know, same-sex couples, and so her world starts to expand. And although she doesn't thrive in the classroom there the way that she thrived in her classrooms in Corona, she stops going to school and then just uses that time to basically explore Manhattan. And it was really fun to just write about all these places in Manhattan that I also love. She goes to the Met instead of going to the school. She goes to Central Park. She rides back and forth in the Staten Island Ferry. She just falls in love with New York City. And I think she just has freedom of movement which I think is something that city kids have earlier on sometimes. Because of the subways and the buses there is this way that she can just go all over the place without her parents knowing.

Jo Reed:  I'm nodding vigorously because I grew up in New York. I always maintained that we had so much more freedom.

Bushra Rehman:  Yeah, I know. You don't have to have someone driving you everywhere.

Jo Reed:  Nobody has to drive you. You get on a bus, or you walk. Taking the subway on your own that was a definite step that came later. But buses, walking, go.

She begins this passionate friendship with Angela who becomes her lover. And Angela also opens her eyes in more ways than one, more ways than her sexuality, though, God knows that's big, because she grew up in the East Village.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes. And Razia is very impressed by that. She grew up in the East Village and Angela's mother and her are both readers. And so their house is just filled with books. To Razia who loves libraries, she's like, oh my God, this house is like a library. And so she starts to almost imagine like, what if I could have an apartment one day that's filled with books? What if I could have an apartment in a city where I could be anonymous? Because in Corona everyone knows her, whether it's the bodega owner or, you know, all the uncles or the aunties. Everybody knows, all the kids from her school. But here she realized she can be anonymous in the city and she's craving that anonymity so that she can, you know, start fresh and create her own self. And so she starts to feel these things with Angela and takes her to the Strand. And where she goes to the West Village for the first time and sees that out queer community. And so that is a way that Angela opens up her world. And you know, Angela also, her parents have just gotten divorced and so Angela is also lost and struggling. I think that there's a way that they're both kind of lost--not lost. That's maybe not the right word, but they're both feeling…

Jo Reed:  Yeah. They're searching.

Bushra Rehman:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah. Searching, that’s the word. Yeah.

Jo Reed: Well, Razia isn't only the protagonist. She's also the narrator.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  Why the decision to make it a first-person narrative?

Bushra Rehman:  You know, I did play around with both. And then I just felt that ultimately, it felt more felt more authentic and it felt more like a diary. I wanted people to be as close as possible to this narrator. And I felt that any kind of barriers I could take away between the reader and Razia, the reader and the narrator, I wanted those barriers to be removed. And so I decided to go with first person. But it took me a while to figure out what the exact perch was because for example, that opening paragraph is told from-- it's almost like an older Razia. You know? Who is now describing the neighborhood. But what age she was I had to know for myself. What age she was when she's giving that description, you know. And it's soon after the book ends, but not too soon-- not in too long after the book ends. And it took me a while to find out exactly like what that perch was for the narrator to speak from.

Jo Reed:  I was going to ask you how long it took you to find her voice because it's a voice that ages, so changes over time. It's not like an adult narrator, whose voice can be pretty stable. I mean, she's in the midst of flux.

Bushra Rehman:  I mean, it took me a long time to write this book. And sometimes I would leave it for long periods of time. And then, in order to find that voice again, I would, I would write a lot of poetry. I have another book called Corona in which there are some of the parts this book are in that book. And so that book came from a bunch of poetry I was writing about Corona. And so this voice really came through poems that I was writing about Corona about the city about being, Pakistani American in the city. And so the voice comes very much from that kind of spoken word world of New York City in the ‘90s. And then as it continued to grow, I think that I just brought in a lot of the humor that I experienced in my chosen family. And as the character started to come alive, you know, they really-- like Eliza you mentioned and Taslima, they really took off and sometimes I had to remind myself to give Razia has some dialogue because, you know, Eliza and Taslima could just talk and talk and talk. And I was like, okay Razia has to have some dialogue as well.

Jo Reed:  Well, the book is a novel, obviously, but I have to think it has echoes of your own life. And I'm wondering how you navigated that and especially navigated that with your family.

Bushra Rehman:  Well, you know, the reason I chose to write something similar to my life is I just feel I have not seen much like this in, you know, Western literature about a queer Muslim girl from Queens. You know? I mean everything about her class background, her queerness and her identity also as a budding artist because really that's what she is. You know, this is a portrait of an artist as a young woman as well. And so all of those aspects, I really wanted to see a book like this in the world and so that's why I wrote it, and I chose this content, these concepts. I teach a class called “Two Truths and a Lie. Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.”  I would take a little tiny seed of something that happened to me or to someone else, and I would just allow it to grow into a scene. I would just mix it up. And I think the best metaphor, which is my favorite bird, is the mockingbird. You know, I think that this book is very much like a mockingbird song where I just listened to all these different things and then I put them all together into a narrative. And the thing with my family my father passed away a few months before the book came out. And I think that-- and it's been very hard, but I think that strangely, you know, I think his opinion was the one I was maybe most concerned about. And I do feel that now in this ancestral world that he is in, I feel pride, maybe. Who knows if it's in my mind. But for everyone else it's-- I can honestly say it doesn't matter. I mean, obviously, my mom called in the middle of this, you know, we are still-- we have-- and this is what I teach to my students, too, is that families go through all kinds of things together. And they get mad at each other and then they make up and then they get mad at each other and then makeup. And one should never deny themselves being an artist because of their fears of what their families are going to say because you have to live your own life path. And, you know, you have your own soul. You have your own purpose in life. And if you're driven to be an artist like that is your purpose. And that is what you have to fulfill. And your family will hopefully, ultimately, accept you. And if they do not then I mean I'm a queer person, so I have a chosen family. You know? You build chosen family. You build other families. I am close to my family. I was working on this book while my dad, you know, was dying and in hospice. And I think that a lot of what I wanted to put in this book was honoring what people like him have made in this country.  And many of the other aunts and uncles are also no longer with us who are in this book and because COVID hit Queens very, very hard. And so, I think this is a time capsule of these beautiful people. And I want their memories to live on.

Jo Reed:  Well, you've examined aspects of growing up and moving on in your earlier book “Corona” which you refer to and that's a series of linked vignettes that move around in time. And actually is great to read with “Roses”. I read “Roses” first and then “Corona.” But I wonder what compelled you to return to this territory? What you did in “Roses” that you didn't do in “Corona”.

Bushra Rehman:  Well, “Corona” came first.  Basically, when I wrote “Corona” I was much younger. And “Corona” jumps around in time between Razia's childhood and then her adventures on the road and even older, you know, in her thirties. And I knew that all throughout that I was avoiding writing about one of the hardest things for many queer children which is when/ if they are outed and they don't want to be. Or if their parents find out and it's kind of hard.  I was avoiding that moment. So much of the experimental structure of “Corona” which jumps back and forth in time is almost like a magician's trick, so people will not notice that actually the most important part of the book is not in there, which is when she is disowned from her family. And so in this book I wanted to just go into that absence, into that erasure, into the hardest thing until my father passed, one of the hardest things that had happened. And so that part is very autobiographical. And so once I went into that, which I thought was going to be this black hole, it turned out that there was just all these friendships I remembered, and the community. And also, I rediscovered aspects of my own self as a spiritual person when I was writing “Roses” because I remembered like, “oh, I used to really enjoy that. Or, oh wow, I remember, you know, speaking to Allah that way.”  And, again, this is not memoir, but I gave Razia a lot of those experiences because I almost feel that spirituality is a human right. And when a queer person is cut off from their religion, or spirituality something very, very important is being taken away from them. And, for me, I feel that in writing this book-- and “Roses” took about 10 years to write. In writing this book I rediscovered those aspects of my own spiritual core.

Jo Reed:  You come to writing through poetry. And you've done a lot of spoken word poetry. You've had a collection of your poems published. So this is kind of a two-parter, but I'm wondering when you first started to write. And if you knew early on that writing would be a driving force in your life. Or is that something you came to later?

Bushra Rehman:  I always wrote in my diary, since, and I didn't have money to buy a diary, so I would just like staple together loose leaf and that was my diary. My diary was a place that I could basically pour out all of everything that was happening in my life that I couldn't share with other people. And I started writing poetry early on, too. There was one year when I didn't go to school for a year. It's a long story, but I didn't go to school for a year. And so I just entertained myself and kept my mind agile through writing poetry. And I write poetry about everything. I would write stories. And so I kept myself busy that way. And then I never thought it could be a career because again, I wasn't seeing anyone who looked like me or wrote about the things I wrote about in the books that I was reading. And so I never thought it could be a career. And then when I moved back to New York City in my twenties, someone turned me on to this group called the South Asian Women's Creative Collective. And I started going to meetings. And it was, people like me. They were South Asian women. Now, many identify as a South Asian non-binary artists. And we would all meet once a month and share our work with each other. And then we would put on shows and fundraisers. And then I discovered other communities like this. This was in the late ‘90s in New York City and there was all this like arts and activism happening with BIPOC artists. And then, you know, I discovered Cave Canem, in Kundiman and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association. It was just a very exciting time, but none of that translated into a workable living. So I was also working at bookstores. I worked at the Strand for a while. And I also started teaching in the public schools through amazing organizations such as Teachers and Writers Collaborative which were created by June Jordan and Kenneth Koch and other poets who felt that New York City public school children weren't getting the arts education that everyone has a right to have. And so that was an amazing job. I loved that job. I would just teach poetry to children. And so, yeah, I was teaching poetry to children in the daytime, and then performing poetry in the night. And it was an amazing time, but I love fiction. I love prose. And so, ultimately, I knew I did want to write a novel, but I had to learn how to write a novel.

Jo Reed:  We often think of writing as a solitary process and it often is, but it isn't done in isolation. That creative family is so necessary, I think.

Bushra Rehman:  Oh, yes. I mean for me, it is so much about the community. And I know that I would not have this life if it was not for those fellow artists in, you know, the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, you know, in Cave Canem, in Kundiman, in all these organizations that have been like family. And I run these writing circles as well, in which I'm a mentor and a teacher to young writers. And, you know, I'm now the big sister and the auntie in these families. You know? And we have two hour classes and then we go hang out for three hours because I feel like it's in the hanging out that the beauty of the artists’ life also happens.

Jo Reed:  I agree. You and Daisy Hernandez are co-editors of “Colonize This” which celebrated its 20th anniversary a couple of years ago. I mean that is insane.

Bushra Rehman:  I know.

Jo Reed:   Can you explain a bit about that book for listeners who might not know about it?

Bushra Rehman:  Well, thanks for bringing it up and thank you so much for this deep dive. It's fun. So Daisy and I met through these communities. I was doing open mics and Daisy heard me at an open mic. And we were both in this other organization called Women in Literature and Letters which was founded by these Latinx writers Angie Cruz, Marta Lucia Adelina, Anthony Day started this organization. And we would have free writing workshops because the founders had gone through MFA programs and had a really hard time. And so they wanted to create these safe spaces for-- again, I'm using language from the time-- that women of color to gather in each other's living rooms and teach each other writing. So I met Daisy that way. And Angie actually recommended that Daisy and I work together on this book, and it was an amazing experience. Daisy is still one of my closest friends. And we both had learned about feminism and college. And we felt, again, that the women like my mother, a woman like Razia’s mother, a woman like Daisy's mother, a lot of times these mothers and aunties were not like portrayed in the feminism-- we felt that there was a feminism we were learning at home of how to be fierce. And there was a feminism we were learning in school. And we wanted feminism to be a philosophy that would be for everyone. We wanted feminism to be a philosophy that women in our communities also would benefit from. And so what we did was we-- and this is like before social media and even really before internet really took off, so it was very word of mouth. We just put a word out that we wanted to collect stories from women of color who identified as womanist or feminist or who are even struggling with those concepts. And we wanted to read essays by them. And we got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of essays. And we ended up choosing 28 for the first anthology. And we didn't just choose them. We ended up working with each writer over multiple drafts like over a period of a year or more, and really having some amazing conversations and hard conversations about their essays. And then in 2019, we actually did a new edition because we felt that so much had changed. We wanted to bring in, you know, Black Lives Matter, Trans Justice, the amazing work that undocumented students were doing in the city schools in New York City. We wanted to bring in all this activism that was taking place in the last 20 years. And we felt that it was time to put out a new anthology. So in 2019, we did one with new essays, new forwards. And so many people have gone on to tell me what this book has meant to them because this book contains the experience of, you know, black, indigenous Latinx, Asian, South Asian, Muslim, so many different experiences and so many ways of viewing feminism and womanism. And it's something that Daisy and I are really, really happy that we did. And it’s been one of the things in my life that I am very proud of being a part of.

Jo Reed:  Well, as we said, you began as a poet and that's really clear from the way you use language which is so wonderful and powerful. But I wonder if it was challenging to transition to fiction, and what you had to consider that you didn't have to consider when you were writing poetry?

Bushra Rehman:  Oh my God, there's so much. And I think one day I would love to teach a class on this or something because there's a lot of poets who wanted to transition to fiction writing. One thing is that, you know, poetry is like a sprint. I could sit down, I could get an idea. I could write a poem. I could just sit down and write a poem. And even if it's not finished, the essence of it is there.  With fiction it's a long marathon in which you have to sustain that level of energy and excitement for each scene. A lot of these stories and chapters did begin to as a poem. I had one image in mind, one object in mind, one moment in mind that I wanted to write about. And so I would start as a poem and then I'd have to develop the characters. And then I'd have to make sure the characters were consistent with how they appeared in other chapters.  I had to add dialog that, again, felt authentic to who the characters were. I was working with multiple languages and often many of the characters are not speaking English, but I'm translating what they're saying into English. And when I was doing those translations I'd have to make sure that the translations-- even if they weren't word-for-word-- that the rhythm of the sentences was more similar to the rhythm of the sentences of the original language. So in that way, poetry came in really handy. And I think-- so yeah, but so many of these chapters started out as a visual moment, the way that a poem would start out as a visual moment, but much harder. Much harder to write prose.

Jo Reed:  One thing I really appreciated is you don't over explain cultural references. You just trust the reader will figure it out. Or can find Google and do it. It makes me happy because you're not taken out of the book.

Bushra Rehman:  Yes, thank you. I mean that really was important for me. One of my cardinal rules was that I did not want to explain the references. Because often for me as a person from this background if I was reading a book from another South Asian writer and they started to explain the reference then I would think, “oh, this book is not for me.”   I want everyone to love this book and enjoy it. But I was really thinking of, you know, a young queer working class Pakistani girl who might find this book in the library and it's for her. So, I feel that that does take readers out of the moment, and I wanted readers to stay present in the moment. And I think my poetic background of just giving lots and lots and lots of description is a way around that. So like there's one scene with her like making samosas and I really had to like to go into all the details of it but make it part of the narrative. But you could actually learn how to make samosas by reading that chapter.

Jo Reed:  Well, speaking of a young queer Pakistani girl, we leave Razia in a liminal moment and I don't mean to imply it's a cliffhanger, it is not. But she's about to move into the world. And I'm hoping we're going to be able to read about her doing this.

Bushra Rehman:  I hope so, too.

Jo Reed:  Are we?

Bushra Rehman:  Yes. Yes. I am-- you know, the thing is that these characters are not done yet. I had a little time to write yesterday, and I was writing and it’s just like the scenes are coming. And I'm really excited because I'm going away on a writing residency and I just want to spend time thinking about what this next book is going to be. But those stories are definitely being downloaded right now.

Jo Reed:  Well, Bushra, I do look forward to seeing what happens to Razia next. It's been such a great journey to take with her and I'm signed up for the rest of ride whenever that bus pulls up.

Bushra Rehman:  Thank you. Well, hopefully, it will be much sooner since I don't have a young child. And, you know, so I think that it will be a lot faster of a process, hopefully. Thank you for this conversation.

Jo Reed:  Not at all. Thank you.

Jo Reed:  That was Bushra Rehman—we were talking about her novel; “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion.” You can keep up with her at Bushra Rehman.com You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Please follow us where ever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple—it will help other people who love the arts to find us. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.