Forum from the Archives: Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar Celebrate their Artistic Mind Meld
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, have you ever felt so creatively connected to someone that it's like you share the same brain? That's how acclaimed writers Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar describe their relationship. They're best friends who wrote their recent novels, Wandering Stars and Martyr, by sending each other cheer notes. Or as Akbar puts it, they wave their pom-poms with genuine excitement at what the other had just wrought from the ether.

I spoke to Akbar and Orange in March, just as they are about to embark on a Bay Area driving tour to celebrate their friendship and art. We listen back to that episode next on Forum.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Meena Kim. You may know writer Tommy Orange for his celebrated novels Wandering Stars and They're There, which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. And you may know Kaveh Akbar for his novel Martyr, a 2024 National Book Award finalist, or for his poetry collections.

What you may not know is that Akbar and Orange are best friends. And while writing their latest novels, they exchanged pages of their work weekly and gave each other words of encouragement that Orange calls cheer notes. So listeners, do you have a friend like that who's consistently given you artistic support?

Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and Kaveh Akbar's Martyr are now out in paperback, and the two are with us now on Forum just before they launch a Bay Area tour together. Thanks for coming to the station, Tommy. Hi, thanks so much for having me. And Kaveh, thanks for joining us from Iowa Public Radio. It's my luck to be here. Thank you so much. So tell me, Kaveh, how did you and Tommy meet?

Tommy came to give a reading at my previous institution. I teach at the university of Iowa now, but I had been teaching at another institution. And shortly after Tommy's first book, transcendent American classic there, there came out, uh,

He came to read at my previous institution, and I was the person charged with schlepping him around. I was a huge fan of his work, but I was also at work, you know, and so I was sort of maintaining my professional veneer and doing everything properly and by the books. And at some point, I was driving him to an event, and...

what the coolest thing he had gotten to do on tour was and he said he got to sit in on a Simpsons table read and I

muttered a curse word under my breath in unsquashable jealousy and he heard it and laughed so loud and suddenly we were talking to people like friends and not like people at their jobs. Did you know Kaveh and his work before he schlepped you around in his car, Tommy? I knew of his work and I was a huge fan of his poetry and

But we had just met actually through a friend of mine, Therese Maya, who was also teaching at Purdue then. That's how I ended up there. So we hadn't met at all. And we knew of each other's work and that was all. So how did the actual sharing of writing start? Because I know that, Kaveh, you had mentioned to Tommy that your spouse had a new book out or something. Hmm.

Yeah, so my spouse is the poet Paige Lewis, and their first book was called Space Truck. And when I said the name of that book to Tommy, he said, oh, Space Truck. And I said, no, silly new friend, it's called Space Truck. And he was like, oh, you should write a poem called Space Truck. And I kind of smiled politely and went about the evening. But then that night when I got home,

within an hour of getting home, Tommy had sent me an email with a poem in it called Space Truck. And it was wonderful. It was a delightful poem. And, um,

And so not to be outdone by a novelist, as a poet myself, I stayed up all night writing my poem called Space Truck and sent it to him. And as soon as he saw it, he said, this is great. What's our next word? And so we just started volleying words back and forth and pages. And then we started, you know, trading pages really regularly, which we did for years. And when did these pages, Tommy, sort of become...

the seeds of your novels and also what you've described as cheer notes, which I assume meaning like words of encouragement or. Yeah. Well, um, I'm, um, always wanting my favorite poets to write novels instead of poetry books. And, um, you know, I'm sure he would have written, um, a novel anyway, but I was definitely encouraging him to do it. Um,

And he was encouraging me to write poetry, which is probably not a good thing. And at some point we were having a conversation about, I don't know, like musicians get to jam together and writers are very solitary. And, you know, we...

famously solitary and we don't have the same space. And so we talked about what that would look like. And that turned into what was already just kind of an open sharing situation, sending pages back and forth turned into like a Friday, uh,

like a weekly Friday share to make it more regular and have that sort of jam together space created. And I think by the, by nature of what we were sharing, it being really new and raw and the purpose being to keep writing as opposed to like, send me your, you know, your best critical feedback for, you know, for me to really think about whether or not this is any good and instead like keep going essentially. Yeah.

So I'm getting a sense of just how meaningful these notes were then to the two of you. Kaveh, I'm wondering what effect you would say they had on you or your work as well. Well, there is a propulsivity there.

Right.

Right. There's a desire to, you know, I've joked that it felt like, you know, showing my macaroni art to Michelangelo or something. Right. Like I'm truly I was truly learning this form as I was sending it to Tommy Orange, who's one of my favorite practitioners of the form. And so.

And so that really pushed me to keep up. And yeah, like Tommy said, the encouragement was the cheer notes were... I think that we are both writers who have very loud voices in our heads that say, this is no good, you're a fraud, and now everyone can see. And so having...

Having someone like Tommy say, oh, this is a great line. This is a great metaphor. Like, I love this moment. This made me laugh. Was so immeasurably affirming and the kind of attaboy gold star that I really needed. Yeah, you did sort of make the transition from...

poetry to prose. You had two poetry collections, Pilgrim Belle and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. And you worked really hard, right, to make that transition to prose. Can you just give us a sense of your kind of prose consumption diet to make this happen?

Yeah, yeah. So this whole time that I was working on Martyr, I was reading two novels a week and watching a movie a day, usually about, I mean, seven movies a week minimum. Sometimes it would be a little bit more than that, and always two novels a week. And Tommy reads as voraciously as anyone I know. I mean, he just inhales books. And so getting to be excited about books that we were talking about, and also sort of

uh thinking about what we might mine from those books like oh my god like this is how morrison describes the floor plan of picola breedlove's house uh without you even realizing that that's what she's doing or this is how henry james talks about um how this character's finances worked without you even realizing that that's what he's doing you know you you do all of the kind of

hidden behind the curtains architectonic work of narrative and watching, you know, and getting to talk about that with a practitioner who I really admire as much as I do Tommy, as much as I do any living artist. Getting to talk about that really nitty gritty stuff in the reading was just, I mean, that was as good a masterclass as anyone's ever had in how to write narrative. Tommy Covey is talking about

Sort of the confidence that you gave him to write the novel. And also, you know, I feel like how the notes sometimes I think would reveal things to you about your own work, maybe that you hadn't even considered. Do you have an example of something that Kaveh wrote to you that really moved Wandering Stars along for you? Well, first I want to say, yeah.

I feel like my silence after Kavi's been saying such nice things about me is complicit. I agree, and I can't make a face at the audience. I'm not in agreement with what he's saying. So I just want to make a note here that I'm not over here putting my thumbs up about what he's saying about me. You know, there was no specific moment. I think it is something that happened before.

At crucial moments, you know, when you have somebody you can send pages to when you're not feeling good and know that they're going to say something back that makes you feel understood. On a lot of levels, on an artistic level, I was, you know, I wrote a lot about addiction and wandering stars, and this is something that he's very well versed in. For him to understand on multiple levels what the material I was working with was really important at a lot of different moments, which is why the weekly part of it was necessary. Yeah.

I want to talk to you more about that. One note, Cave was sort of transitioning to writing a novel, right? He was writing prose when so much of his work had been poetry in a way, or at least his published work. In your case, you were writing a second novel after an incredibly successful first.

And so I was wondering if you were feeling different pressures with Wandering Stars, and I don't know if Kaveh helped with that at all too, but I've always wondered about what it's like for that second novel, that second work after a hugely successful first. Yeah, I think with the sophomore effort, you know, the sophomore album in music, everyone's sort of there to see whether you fail or not. And it,

it's arguably, it's more fun to watch somebody fall than to succeed again. And so that's, there's, there's a pressure that's a part of it. And there are voices in the revision room and in the writing room, um, that were not present when I was writing there, there, I didn't, you know, I was into my MFA for part of it. And for part of it, my wife was reading pages as they came out. And, um,

I didn't have a sense of audience at all. And like I said, for the second book, because of the success of the first, people are there to see what happens. Regardless of if I deny that there's an audience, there still is one to see whether it succeeds or fails. So I had to work through that. And I wouldn't say...

Our trading of pages or him specific help guide me through that part of it. But again, having somebody weekly that I could rely on and having an understanding on the other end of what we're doing with language, which is a really vital part of poetry and prose and in trying to communicate things that are often really difficult to communicate,

It was helpful in so many different ways. We're talking with Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar. And listeners, have you read Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange or Martyr by Kaveh Akbar? What do you want to ask or tell the authors? What would you like to ask Orange and Akbar about their friendship? Or do you have a friend who consistently gives you artistic support? What has...

Someone, when has someone encouraged you creatively? 866-733-6786 is the number. 866-733-6786. Email address forum at kqed.org. And you can find us on our social channels at KQED Forum. Zoe writes, I work at Green Apple Books and have chatted with you both and have so much love for you. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim. Change is always happening. It's part of life.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking with writers Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar about their friendship and how they support each other's work and have supported each other's work through weekly cheer notes. Tommy Orange is the author of Wandering Stars and They're There. Kaveh Akbar has written Martyr, the novel Martyr, and the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic.

Listeners, do you have a friend who consistently gives you artistic support that you want to shout out? What would you like to ask Tommy Orange or Kaveh Akbar about their friendship? And if you've read Wandering Stars or Martyr or other works by our guests, feel free to ask or tell the authors whatever has been burning for you. The email address forum at kqed.org. On Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786.

866-733-6786. Kaveh, you know, friendships, relationships really are at the heart of Martyr as well. And thinking in particular, of course, about the novel's protagonist, Cyrus Shams, and his best friend, Zee, can you talk about their relationship? Well, thank you for reading it, first of all. It's not a small gift. Yeah, I...

I have a lot of friends in my life and have had a lot of friends in my life who have...

who have just been there for me and seen me when I couldn't see myself and shown love for me and given me love freely when I was not totally available to receive it or even recognize it was being given to me. And I've been on both sides of that relationship a million times in my life. I imagine most people have been. And I wanted to write a friendship story

the love was not contingent upon a certain behavior or expectation, but that it was truly unassailable and irrevocable, right? Yeah. Are there any parallels between your and Tommy's friendship that informed at all Cyrus and Z? Well,

I mean, that's a tricky question narratively for those who have read the book. But yeah, I would say, you know, one thing that is true is that I was reading ravenously as I was writing Martyr. I was reading absolutely voraciously in a very lowercase C Catholic curation of texts from, you know, the sort of pinky in the air literary fiction to, you know,

you know, just pulp thrillers and graphic novels and things like this. And so I was reading very widely and being cross-pollinated by this panoply of voices. But I was also every single week reading Tommy Orange, right? Because I was getting these new pages. I was getting 10 or 15 new pages from Tommy Orange every week. And so I've been indelibly influenced by this massive bouquet of

of writers and thinkers and makers, but there's no greater influence on the book than Tommy just because of the pure fact that I was so immersed in his voice and his sound when I was writing the book. And so Tommy is, you know, stitched through every chapter

you know, space in the book, stitch through every line of the book in some way, whether explicitly, narratively, or just, you know, the frequency at which we vibrate and operate as friends. Yeah. The friendship that I'm thinking about in Wandering Stars, Tommy, is the one between Orville Redfeather and Sean Price. You were talking about addiction earlier and, you know, they are both in the grips of addiction. Um,

After injuries, they're bonded in ways because of losses in their lives too. Can you talk about that friendship and how you constructed it the way you did?

Yeah. You know, this was not necessarily something that I had a lot of experience with, not in terms of addiction, in terms of a friendship that was like theirs, where they both had active addictions and that was part of what bonded them. So that was, you know, that was something that I...

and this is what we do in fiction. And, you know, it's based on lots of life experience. And, and, um, and I think having Kaveh read those parts, um, and understand the friendship and be able to give feedback was, was also really helpful because I know that he knows that kind of friendship really well. Um, and so that was, that was something that, um,

I understood in sending those pages particularly. You, I think, have talked about, Tommy, how you feel like the way addiction is written about, well, there's a lot of room for improvement. What was it that you were hoping to convey through your portrayal of addiction and Wandering Stars? Well, I think it's often...

seen as a moral failing. Just the general person, I think, judges people that suffer from addiction in a way that's really simplistic. And so, you know, I'm writing In Wandering Stars specifically about seven generations of people, of Native people, and meaning for the reader to understand the way history is written

present in the present and in, in characters' lives. Um, you know, that's not to say everybody who has trauma or generational trauma, um, has an addiction problem, but it, it means to answer that it's more complex. And, um, you know, at a, at a time right now, politically, when we're looking, we're staring at sort of the true colors of America and its foundation. Um,

We can see the history in the present and we actively have to resist it and find ways to confront it and understand how much history and the present are always talking. So I wanted to depict that in addiction and how it plays out in contemporary Native characters' life. You wrote a very historically grounded novel in the Sand Creek Massacre, right?

But I also heard you say that you don't necessarily like or had planned to write history or historically based. So how'd you get over that? Yeah, because Native people are so often depicted only historically. And it's the way it's taught in institutions is Native people, past tense. Even still, you know, with a show like Yellowstone being so huge, you

That's essentially still... Natives are still kind of in the past, the way it's talked about. So I was in Sweden for the translation of There There, and I'd been writing a straightforward sequel to There There for a year. And I found this newspaper clipping in a museum. I was getting this awkward tour from a curator who was...

very aware of how problematic museums are and the way they end up with things. Yeah. But they were, but he was like, do you want to see your people's stuff? Like he showed me behind glass, all this Southern Cheyenne stuff, regalia. And I saw this newspaper clipping about Southern Cheyennes in Florida in 1875. And I fell down this rabbit hole of information about the origin of boarding schools and my tribe, half of the prisoners who were at this prison castle were,

which is where Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, boarding school, he was the jailer there. And it just, you know, it led me to want to write about this aspect of history and how it connected to my tribe. And then I was doing some research and found a list of the actual prisoners at that prison castle. And one of them, its name was Bear Shield, which was from a family from there, there. And that was just like a weird coincidence that

That made me want to understand how there could be a connection. And that's where the generational line leading up to the aftermath of their there. Yeah. Kaveh, historical event. A historical event also grounds martyr in the USS Vincennes incident where the U.S. naval warship that shot down an Iran Air passenger flight in 1988 figures dead.

When did you know that event would be foundational for martyr? It's an event I've always been fascinated by, the idea that 290 innocent civilians could be shot out of the sky, including 66 children, and that country will just kind of write it off as the unpleasant but necessary cost of being a military superpower in the world. And when I talk about it at readings...

really fascinating thing to me is that the

the vast majority of people don't know about it, don't remember it, weren't alive when it happened and were never taught about it, which makes sense because we live in a nation where such things happen with some degree of regularity, right? You can, it has the kind of uncanny consistency of hard science, the frequency of such events. And so when I,

bring it up at events, nobody whips out their phone and says, oh, surely he's making this up. Surely this is fiction. Surely he's exaggerating, right? Everyone...

even today understands that they're not knowing about 290 innocent civilians being shot out of the sky by a U.S. naval warship in 1988 is, yeah, that probably happened, right? That sounds like the sort of thing we would do, right? And it sounds like the sort of thing that I might not have heard about. And that is what is really chilling to me. And I think it has to do with the

of a number like 290. There's no somatic correlative to cold casualty data like that. Tommy's book does amazing work with this too. The narrativization of this data that we know about, right? We've maybe, we've heard of residential schools and we've heard about these horrific events

figure is coming out of them. But when you see these individual human lives, it attaches to the cool abstraction of casualty data, the somatic obliteration of individual grief, right? And that is a potential of narrative art in which I'm very, very, very interested.

We're talking to Kaveh Akbar, who's written Martyr, and Tommy Orange, who's written Wandering Stars. Both books are now out in paperback, and they're touring together because they're best friends, and they played a big role in each other's lives writing these books. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation by emailing forum at kqbd.org, finding us on iTunes.

our social channels at KQED Forum, and by calling 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. Have you read Wandering Stars of Martyr and have questions you want to share for the authors or are what they are describing reminding you of your own friendships and meaningful encouragement that you've received in your life? Let me go to Catherine in Oakland. Hi, Catherine, you're on.

Hi. So many topics. I've read, I recently read Martyr, and I totally could...

feel Tommy Orange's influence, and I just think it's great. I really do get this sense of you guys being brothers under the skin. I just had a chance to discuss the book with another white Christian background friend, and we got in a little semantics thing about whether a martyr...

Whether you can be a martyr if you commit suicide. And I'll just also say I had a trip to Iran in 2015. So I had a little thought, like whether there were other interpretations of martyr in Islam that we wouldn't be aware of. So you mentioned Bobby Sands and then obviously the mother and maybe others.

Anyway, that was some more about the definition, I guess, of martyr. We got into a little word thing about that. Sure, sure. Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, that's a beautiful question. Yeah, that's a beautiful question. Thanks, Catherine. My luck to have been the beneficiary of your attention, sincerely. Yeah, in Islam...

martyrdom is as vexed as it is in Christianity or really any other. You know, you can sort of count the Catholic martyrs off as you can in Islam. But in Shia Islam especially, which is the type of Islam that is the majority of Iranians are Shia Muslims if they're Muslim.

And in Shia Islam, the idea of martyrdom is particularly entrenched in the theology and also in the culture because of the martyrdom of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet, and also Shia.

because of the martyrdom of Hussein and the battle of Karbala, the prophet's grandson. Um, and you know, on the, on the martyrdom of Hussein every year, there's a day called Ashura, which is like this national day of mourning, not dissimilar from, um, what native people do in the States. Um, uh,

now. But it is a national day of mourning. Even as a kid, we were fairly secular, but we would wear black to school, my brother and I, and we wouldn't listen to music on Asherah, even as kids in America. It is that culturally observed. It's not even purely a religious artifact.

And as in America, with our regime and past regimes, the Iranian regime at present has

And in the past several decades has harnessed this cultural veneration of martyrs and these political and these religious venerations of martyrs and sort of politicize them, right? They would call the war dead in the Iran-Iraq war martyrs, though they were conscripted and they were fighting a political war. They, you know, if your son died in

in battle people would show up to your home and say congratulations your son has been martyred right they have poets play at the graveyards of the war martyrs poets and musicians play at the graveyards of the war martyrs and they've really you know dolled it up into this whole thing that elides the ugly politic of

War and battle. Not dissimilar from I was writing a lot of this book during COVID and thinking about the rhetoric of, you know, first responders and, you know, oh, we thank our nurses for their sacrifices and stuff like this, this sort of rhetoric that was preparing our minds and habituating us to.

for their eventual demise in ways that, you know, COVID was a organic pathogenic crisis, but it was exacerbated by myriad systemic and political failures. And so as the Iranian regime practiced this kind of necro Islam and use that rhetoric, I was watching also in my home country of America, the government used this kind of

necrocapitalist sort of faux secular martyrdom rhetoric to prepare us for the eventual deaths of postal carriers and the people who prepare your food at Arby's or Starbucks or nurses and the like. And that tension was really, really provocative and fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah.

Tommy, I read that you once described Cave as being able to strike this balance of being super cerebral and super heart-filled. Why did that strike you so much? Well, I think when I first started writing and reading and wanting to write, I was intimidated by people who could

you know, seem to say a lot with a lot of big words and long sentences. And, you know, I spent a long time trying to prove to myself that I was smart enough to be a writer. And, um, and I sort of, I stopped caring as much about the cerebral writers who could seem to say a lot with a lot of words and long sentences and got more interested in who was really getting to the heart of things. And, um,

And I think it's somewhat rare to have the balance of heart and mind. And Cave is one of those rare writers that combines the super cerebral mind with, you know, the heart is always there beating and you can always feel it in the sentences. And I think there's a lot of people that can sound really smart when they write or when they talk. And it takes something else to be able to do both things at once. We're talking with Tommy Orange now.

Author of Wandering Stars and Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr, and we're talking not just about their books, but also about their friendship. We'll have more with them and with you after the break. Stay with us. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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This is Forum. I'm Nina Kim. Listeners, do you have a friend who consistently gives you artistic support? I'm asking because we're talking with acclaimed writers Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar this hour about their friendship and how they supported each other's work through weekly cheer notes while they were writing Wandering Stars and Martyr. Or maybe you have questions for the two of them about friendship.

their books as well as their friendship. You can email forum at kqed.org, call us at 866-733-6786 or post on our social channels at kqedforum.com.

And Matthew writes,

Have they ever argued passionately or is it always smooth sailing in their collaboration? All right. Who wants to take that first? Blind spots or undeveloped faculties in each other? Go ahead, Tommy. I mean, I think the nature of the question, and I appreciate the listener response.

finding resonance in us with their 20-year collaboration. I think sometimes the nature of feedback and professional relationships and even like the writing workshop as a format is, and even the idea of what critical means is sometimes like you have to be kind of mean or you have to cut into somebody to really be doing something seriously.

And I don't really believe that to be true. I think you can be really smart about what you're telling somebody that could work better while being friendly and supportive, while being a human to the other person who is exposing themselves. Something that they're, you know, to try to do art is a really vulnerable thing.

And I think sometimes the way we think about how to better each other in that space can, to me, I don't agree with it and I don't think Javier does either. The nature of the cheer notes, which is like sort of embarrassing to be openly talking about because it's like a private thing that we talk about and all of a sudden it's like a thing. I think the nature of it is, without ever having had the conversation, is like...

We do a lot of that tearing ourselves apart alone and at revision. And the function of this relationship is to keep writing, which is a really difficult thing to keep doing. So I think the nature of the question around blind spots is like, we're not trying to be a function to one another, a total function of like how to become the best writers we can be. We both have a lot of other support systems and ways, uh,

that we approach the page and how to get it to the

the end point where we're like, this is good enough to turn in. We're not, the nature of our relationship is not to go to each other to fill in all the blind spots. So we, I don't believe we've had any passionate arguments. And, you know, we certainly have had lots of conversations, but that's just not the nature of the relationship. Yeah. Anything you would add, Kaveh, to that? Yeah.

Well, I would. Yeah. I mean, everything that Tommy just said is so true for me. I think we're both quite adept at figuring out what's wrong with our work. I literally just this morning I sent Tommy this excerpt from Virginia Woolf's diary where she says Friday, you know, whatever it was. I think it was a March Friday, 15th of March.

Book, again, very good, very bad yesterday. Right? And I think that we both sort of endlessly oscillate between really loving the thing that we've written and feeling like it represents or gestures towards the phenomenon we were trying to articulate and then thinking it was the worst thing that anyone's ever written and that everyone is going to see us as the naked emperor as we are, etc. But I will also say that we do...

I think that we have passionately disagreed about things like music, right? Or if Tommy really... I mean, we talk about a lot of other stuff besides just the writing. And, you know, there will be an album that Tommy doesn't like that I was like, I would stake my life on this album or, you know, this sort of thing. Although I will also say that there are some eerie simpaticos too across a lot of these axes. It's not just that we really...

celebrate each other's writing, but so much of our lives have uncanny symmetries and our aesthetic predilections, not just the Simpsons, but musically and in literature and film. So, yeah, I mean, we, you know, like any friends, we disagree about art and, you know, movies that we've seen, et cetera. But in terms of the writing, I just,

I just I find myself so often just uselessly barking like a happy walrus at how enamored I am of the thing that he's just written. So I don't know that there's a lot of arguing that happens. Let me go to caller Don in Richmond. Hi, Don. You're on.

Hi. Thank you. I read Tommy Orange's poetry. I heard it over the KQED a few years ago before the pandemic, and I was like, wow, this is it. This is the man here. And I thank you so much for your grit and your just every your wherewithal. You're a bona fide. And the other brother, I don't know you yet, but I'm going to go for you and check you out. But I want to say this. I've been an educator, a writer. I

I don't know. I'm 66 right now. I love being 66. I'm African-American. I'm a black man in this country, in this world. And I tell you this, I'm a writer by dent, you know. And the core of it is I've been an educator as well, and I've seen it at all levels. And I've seen the –

The inability to allow people to write, to learn how to write. It's like it's a mystery. Oh, you can't write, you know. So, no, it's no mystery. We know how to teach people how to write.

Writing is not a mystery. It's a wondrous thing. The power of it. The authority of it. The agency of it. And everything else that comes with it. The art of it. The science of it. Whatever you want to say. The core of it, and I think Tommy and the other author expressed it in other ways, but let me stop. There's not a mystery. There's a brother, an African American in New York, east somewhere, and he was saying...

You know, we make it a mystery. It is not that hard. Yeah. I'd love to get Tommy's thoughts on that. Like we make it seem like it's in a way, I almost feel like Don saying we also then make it seem inaccessible, you know? Thanks, Don. Thank you, Don. Appreciate all your words. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is a problem with writing as a discipline, as an artistic discipline, as a general discipline. We don't talk about it like there's anything to do to get from, you know, do I know how to write to yes, I can say what I mean and what I want to say.

There's this big mystery about like you're visited by the muse or you have a story to tell or there's writer's block. One of the most common questions I get from young people, and I emphasize young people here because these are the people we tell stories

the mystery about writing and we give them this stupid formula. It's, you know, the, the, the essay formula is how to learn how to write and it's not. Um, but the, the most common question is what do you do about writer's block? Um, and it's a real thing, but, but I think the idea that you either have a story or you don't, or you're sort of being visited by the muse or you're not, is not something that like you don't ask anyone.

is there you know you don't ask the concert pianist do you have concert pianist block or you know like Steph Curry doesn't get good at a three-pointer because he's sometimes visited by the muse of three-point shootings because he's shot one million three-pointers in his lifetime and writers don't have the same structure to of discipline but it's also as Don was pointing out there

There are ways to teach what it is. And what it is, is how do you say what you need to say? How do you say what you mean? Like writing is a phonetic thing. It's meant to be like what it's represents letters represents sound, right?

And we all know how to tell stories. This is innate. But we're not taught that in schools. We're taught, like, do you know how to follow the rules? I remember one of the most common pieces of feedback I got from teachers consistently throughout my schooling was like, you don't know what you're doing with commas. They didn't say it like that. But essentially, like, I was trying to find my rhythm in writing with commas and I was doing it wrong. And so all I heard was like, you're doing it wrong. And I was like, I guess I don't know how to write. And a lot of times it ends there for people, for young people.

You're actually visiting schools as part of your driving tour. Is that part of the message you want to send to kids? I mean, I guess I could agree that now maybe it will be. I've never said what I just said before. So it's not like a thing that I'm going out there with. Yeah, yeah. I'm so curious if one of you loved this idea of doing a driving tour about your friendship to promote your books more than the other. Was one of you more excited about it than the other comic? Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know that it was ever so mercenary as we're going to do this driving tour about our friendship to promote our books. To my mind, it's a way to...

hang out with one of my best friends on the planet Earth and get someone else to pay for it. I mean, maybe that does sound craven, but I just like being around Tommy. I like talking to people about writing. Since we started trading pages and Tommy started calling it the band, we've always joked about taking the band on tour. And this is a way to do that, right? We have an excuse. We have these new books.

And we like hanging out with each other. We like, you know, breaking bread and talking about basketballs. I'm proud of Tommy for getting in a Steph Curry reference just then. And we like just chopping it up with each other. And I love meeting people who love writing and talking to them or people who don't know that they love writing or reading yet. And, you know, like Tommy said, I used to teach middle school and then before I wrote my first book of poetry.

And I just love being around young writers, especially if we can get to them before they've internalized these ideas about how this kind of homogenous algorithm of the essay is supposed to look and taste in their mouths and sound and feel. You know, if one can get to them before they've become habituated to that sound, their writing can often be so provocative and wonderful and strange and they're just...

snapping the Lego blocks of language and sound together in just utterly delicious ways that take years to get back to, to sort of disabuse them of the notion that writing is supposed to sound like the chat GPT essay formula that Tommy's talking about.

Um, and, and so, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just really, I'm really looking forward to it because it's going to be fun. You know, I think that we wouldn't be doing it if we didn't think it would be fun. You know, like I've, I've been, I have readers, I have a job, like I'm, I'm fine. Like I'm doing this because I want to hang out with my friend.

Well, TJ on Blue Sky writes, loving this interview. I'm halfway through Wandering Stars and Martyr is next. Looking forward to the Kepler's Literary Foundation event soon. What other literary duos are there past and present? And I am curious about if there is a literary duo that comes to mind for you, Kaveh, when you think about, you know, friendships that really supported each other.

Oh, wow. Yeah. My spouse and I really love the New York school poets. Um, so thinking about Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and Amiri Baraka giving readings together, or, um, you know, there's, there's, uh,

There are, you know, that is when my spouse and I were courting, we lived across the country from each other and we would send postal letters to each other. And that particular group of poets, A, wrote a lot of love poems and B, titled their poems poems.

like just names of dates, you know, like March 3rd. And so, so often when I was sending a letter to Paige, I could find a love poem called March 3rd by Kenneth Coke and it would be the perfect love poem and I would just, you know, hand write it out there and it would just seem so divine and faded. But,

And so consequentially, that group of poets who were all reading each other and blurbing each other and gassing each other up and running around with each other and going to parties and falling down with each other became a kind of foundational set of voices in my marriage. And so that's one that leapt to mind when you asked the question. Love that. Well, every one of my listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Maya on Discord writes, it's hard to express how grateful I am to Tommy and Kaveh for their books and for helping bring each other's work into existence. I specifically want to thank Tommy for the prologues to both There, There and Wandering Stars. They're stunning and I find myself holding my breath every time I read them.

Another listener writes, there is a weird, amazing scene in Martyr. It's a dream sequence featuring Lisa Simpson and Cyrus Sham's mother, Roya. I have to imagine, Kaveh, that you shared this with Tommy since he's a fellow Simpsons fan. And Tommy, did you double share this? Yeah.

Absolutely. I shared it. Thank you for reading it. Yeah, absolutely. I shared it with Tommy with such zeal and glee to show him this thing that I knew immediately he would be primed to like. Yeah, that was a really fun one. I think there was also some convincing, you know, and I know he believed in the work, but I sort of knew that because it was a dream sequence.

Um, there's a lot of naysaying in the editorial space, um, and maybe in the narrative space in general. Like we don't want to hear about your dreams. Dreams are important. And that's a very American cultural value that dreams aren't important. Um,

And I was, you know, Simpsons and Dreams, and I'm passionate about both. And so I was very much like in support of keeping the Lisa Simpson sequence. Yeah. You have also said, Tommy, that you like writing the interiority of people as opposed to maybe a lot of dialogue, which there are moments, right, when dialogue is quite sparse in Wandering Stars. Why is that?

So, you know, I try to use fiction to do what only fiction can do. And, you know, there's a lot of writing feedback out there. Like, where's the scene? Where's the scene? Give us the story. And like, it's useful because the reader wants to be grounded in that. The anchor should be, you know, space and time and what's happening with the character. We want to we want to know what the story is about and what's going on.

But it's over prescriptive. I think the idea that we need the scene, you know, we have TV and movies probably at their best state ever. And they're going to do scenes better than fiction ever could. What fiction can capture that movies and TV do not capture is reality.

the contours of interiority and all the ways that we think and what consciousness does, all the weird feelings we have. There's no room for that in a, you know, generally in TV or movies, you might have a, you know, a voiceover do some of that work, but generally fiction is,

creates this landscape of the interior. And it has done that historically. And I think sometimes I fear what the MFA program does is emphasize scene too much and want too much of exterior and story because it sells and is guided by an industry. And that's all fine and well, but because this is the way books move. But I think

You know, we've gone too far into what a story in fiction should be and what it should do. We're already at the end of the hour, which is so hard to believe. But Kaveh, just hearing what Tommy just said, but also, you know, fiction, he...

What fiction can do makes me think a lot about also like what art can do. And earlier Tommy brought up just the times that we're in. And I've been thinking a lot about what can art do for the time we're in. And I'm wondering if you have a thought about that, because it felt like Martyr was really in conversation with that question to some degree. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I believe in art as a channel of action, and I think the indefinite article is important there. I don't believe that it is totalizing. I think a lot about and speak a lot about my students around this idea of art's capacity to, you know, somaticize narrative and to create some...

bodily spiritual urgency around crises that would otherwise remain totally theoretical. And so I say this to say, you know, before this segment, I was listening to the segment around the gentleman who reported on the homelessness in San Francisco. And if I, as an artist, sit down to write about the unhoused in my community, and I say write a poem about the unhoused in my community,

I don't just, you know, sit up from the table and say, all right, my job is done. I wrote this poem, right? Like I write the poem and then I go buy socks and cliff bars and maxi pads and I take them to the mission. And that is how poetry works, right? It points me towards the action. Kaveh Akbar, Tommy Orange. They're celebrating their friendship in the launches of Wandering Stars and Martyr in Paperback. And they joined us on forum. Thank you both so much. I'm Mina Kim.

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