'Mine-ing Joy'. Discovering the work of Ross Gay
and finding Sarah B Franklin, David Naimon, Tin House and the 'Between the Covers' podcast.
Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members!
I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?
Sundays are my favourite reading days.
The Isolation Journals (TIJ) publishes articles and journal prompts. It’s a beautiful community. This last weekend, I followed a thread and found a stack of gems.
This is the small story of how I found myself Mine-ing Joy after a grief-stabbing funeral.
It started with…
The Afterlife of Writing & Carmen Radley on what gladrackets us The Isolation Journals January 26, 2025
Carmen shares: I first encountered “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay more than a decade ago, at a poetry reading of his in San Diego. It took up a quarter of the hour he was allotted—quite a duration for a single poem—but the hundreds of us in the audience sat rapt the entire time. I return to this poem regularly and will for decades to come, I’m sure, for the stunning images; for the music, sometimes mellifluous, sometimes clanging; for the Whitmanian praise of everything, be it blooming or decaying, heavy or light, sad or joyous, or all those things at once.
I’ll return for this line: What gladrackets us. The line before it goes like this: “Thank you what in us rackets glad”—which I take to mean “what clamors and whirls in us and makes us feel alive.” The poet then elides a few words and flips two to coin a new one: what gladrackets us.
So I followed her lead to the poem:
Who is this person?
Ross Gay Demands Our Attention (in a Pandemic or Otherwise) Sara B. Franklin on a True Poet of Our Times. October 21, 20211
His 2015 work, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and also earned Gay multiple shout-outs from Oprah, giving the collection an almost unheard of level of visibility.
But it was his 2019 Book of Delights—his first work of prose—that thrust him into the mainstream; though Gay had a following in the before, his audience has grown exponentially during the pandemic. Some of this is timing: The Book of Delights was published just months before shelter in place orders began. Given its dealings with the sorts of pleasures available to us in lockdown—birdwatching, backyard gardening, rubbing coconut oil into the skin after a hot shower—it resonated with readers who found themselves, overnight, snapped into isolation. In 2020, Delights landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
I highly recommend reading Sara Franklin’s article, especially the context to, and every word of, Ross Gay’s poem ‘ Be Holding’ and the article's final paragraphs.
She also highlights Ross Gay’s podcast interview—a great new podcast source!
“Between the Covers” podcast2 with David Naimon3 at Tin House
Today’s Between the Covers conversation is with the poet Ross Gay about Be Holding, his book-length poem that emerges from a sustained meditation on a mere few seconds of the basketball career of Julius Erving (aka Dr. J). Be Holding is a finalist for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to a work “which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” (This year’s judges are Vievee Francis, Fred Moten, and Tommy Orange).
And this led me to another article.
Ross Gay on the Labor of “Inciting Joy” A conversation with the poet Ross Gay about Inciting Joy, an exploration of joy as a critical emotion that “gets us to love, as a practice of survival.” by Sara Franklin October 25, 2022
Following Carmen’s lead, I discovered this rich gem seam.
“From The Isolation Journals (TIJs) 7-day journal challenge to today's prompt, three words have been recurring for me: Magic, Potential and Grounding. From the between time of Christmas and New Year with a dear friend's passing things have felt 'off'. Anticipatory grief to reality underscored life's fragility, and so uncertainty and fear appeared. Thankfully, the journal challenge offered a communal path forward. Thank you! Reclaiming some of life's magic, seeing the potential around and inside me, creates hope.
Shying away from Winter germs and the cold, given my mother's immunocompromised health also means reimagining 'potential'. Everything is possible, every giggle we have is joy IF I choose to see it that way.
And so, it's this third word, 'Grounding' that gave me the greatest pause. You see, our dear friend, was a 'salt of the earth' no airs or graces character, yet she held the greatest amount of grace and care for others. This is the first verse of a poem I wrote about her, for her - Gratitude and appreciation for her: "Thank you"
Grounding may seem like a simple word
Like ‘an anchor’, ‘tethered’ or ‘down to earth’ but
You connected me back to home
grounded me to what matters most, and,
we giggled.
As always, the synchronicity of TIJ prompts feels like magic. Thank you for introducing me to Ross Gay. I always go to read the full poems you share, Carmen. The urgency and energy in the gratitude poem are a life-giving force.
I found an article by Sarah B Franklin Oct 1 2021 "Ross Gay Demands Our Attention (in a Pandemic or Otherwise) Sara B. Franklin on a True Poet of Our Times". It brought me full circle - here's the final paragraphs:
“An occasional irritation that I have,” he said on the “Between the Covers” podcast with David Naimon, “Is when someone will sort of say a thing like, ‘Oh you know, Ross Gay, he can make anything delightful.’” There, Gay laughed, hard. “And I’m just like, ‘You didn’t read the fucking book!’” He paused, then, starting off in a few different directions (Gay is wont to do this in his speaking as well as his poems), then continuing: When I say joy, I don’t mean satisfaction. I don’t mean contentment. That’s a long way of saying that it’s both irritating and probably, that there is some degree of fear or worry that this is being read in a certain kind of way that diminishes the depth of what I’m trying to say."
So when I’m talking about joy—and I like to say the word grave—because when I’m talking about joy, I’m talking about something that is informed, fundamentally, by the fact that we’re going to die.” It’s not that Gay believes joy can override the abundant horrors of our world and society, or the hurt we impose on one another. Quite the opposite: it’s that he sees the inherent suffering of our lives as the fundamental, binding common ground from which exultation springs, from whose ruins a future is possible.
His defense of his perspective is accurate, provable, even: his poems are not existential in their dealings (though his words and phrases have a tendency to transport, even to transcend, if you’ll let them). Rather, they are grounded in the real, the everyday, the mundane. He writes of buttoning and unbuttoning shirts, being shat on by birds, the smell of semen, buckets of hot wings, and falling down the YouTube rabbit holes of sports clips. His is a poetics of the actual lives we live, rather than the ones we aspire to. Any glory he lands upon is, therefore, one you might access, too. But only with great attention—which requires mighty, and constant practice—can they become palpable to us. “I wonder,” he said in his conversation with Naimon, “If one of practices of joy is to be walking with that understanding perpetually with us: This is changing, this is changing. What a kind of sheen to the world to be like, this very well might be the last time that we are together.”
Like I said, 'Magic', 'Potential' and 'Grounding', are recurring around me, and I'm grateFULL, and GladRacketed. Because now I can also see more GRAVEJoy. Thank you, for leading me to Ross Gay. I'm going to find the podcast now. The magic is a little startling, the grief a little less painful! ;-)
Sometimes, even in painful grief, we can see the gems presented to us.
Ross Gay’s poems have brought me back to the hard human-ing reality of GRAVEjoy: the vital reminder that joy is accessible within our everyday ‘mundane’ lives when we can mindfully grasp the fragility of our human life.
I hope these discoveries, these gems, offer some consolation and resonance if you’re also trying to figure out how to carry grief forward with you.
I’ll be mine-ing joy with the help of Ross Gay’s words and try to be mindfully present so I don’t miss other gems that present themselves to me.
Heaven knows, as World Cancer Day approaches (February 4th) I’m acutely aware of life’s fragility.
I’m sending warm wishes to you and your loved ones.
Please press your heart ‘❤️’ to guide others here
Thank you, dear readers, for all your support. Let’s share empathy, kindness and inspiration wherever we can. Networking Empathy and Inspiration is needed more than ever these days. Thank you!
Sara B. Franklin is a writer, teacher, and oral historian. She received a 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars grant for her research on Judith Jones, and teaches courses on food, writing, embodied culture, and oral history at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of The Editor, the editor of Edna Lewis, and coauthor of The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She holds a PhD in Food Studies from NYU and studied documentary storytelling at both the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She lives with her children in Kingston, New York.
Between the Covers, a literary radio show and podcast hosted by David Naimon, is brought to you by Tin House. These long-form in-depth conversations have been singled out by theGuardian,Book Riot, theFinancial Times, andBuzzFeed as one of the most notable book podcasts for writers and readers around. “If you haven’t peeped this podcast yet,” says poet Morgan Parker, “it’s one of my favorite interviews and my mom says it’s my ‘best one.’”
David Naimon (he/him) is a writer and the host of the literary radio show and podcast Between the Covers. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, Tin House, Boulevard, AGNI, Black Warrior Review and elsewhere. He is also the co-author, with Ursula K. Le Guin, of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, winner of the 2019 Locus Award in nonfiction and a Hugo Award finalist.