Carvell Wallace and Sadie Barnette

Sadie Barnette (00:07):

It's wonderful to be in this cute, indie feminist bookstore. And it's really an honor and pleasure to be with Carvell, who is someone that I love to think with and watch with. And it was beyond heart-altering to be able to spend this much time thinking and talking, listening with, and to Carvell with this book. But yeah, I feel like it's been like 20 years since I read this book the first time.

Carvell Wallace (00:45):

Time is Elastic.

Sadie Barnette (00:46):

How are you today?

Carvell Wallace (00:47):

Not good.

(00:50):

Not really. No, the world is in a bad place, and every day I keep thinking, okay, this is bad, but I can deal with it. And then it's like, oh, you thought you could deal with it? What about this? And I'm like, well, damn, I don't think I can deal with that. Then I go, okay, okay, that's bad, but I can deal with it. And then the next day it's like, oh, okay, well, what about this? So it's really been amazing to watch that process. But yeah, there's something to it, I would say as a writer, in addition to all the other feelings, one thing I marvel at is that is what you're supposed to do with story is you're supposed to build and iterate, and reality is building and iterating in a terrible direction. And that's just something that I'm noticing about being alive at this time.

Sadie Barnette (01:37):

It gets worse.

Carvell Wallace (01:38):

Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think...

(01:40):

Thanks for that. Goodnight. Thank you for coming.

(01:45):

No, but I do think that at some point in my life as an artist, I learned, I started thinking about structure rather than content. Content became less important than the architecture of things. And so I feel the reason, I feel like the only way to counter iteration in this direction is that same shape of iteration, but in another direction. You know what I mean? I think that's where I'm at as a writer. So maybe that's just what I tell myself to get up in the morning and go to my desk. But that's what I feel like. It's like I have to match the opposite of a kind of really twisted insanity is a really ambitious magic. And so I just find myself keep wanting to go further and further into that. What are the mechanisms of magic? How do I create a magic as ambitious as this destruction is ambitious.

Sadie Barnette (02:44):

Yes. It's like it gets worse and it gets deeper, and you get better at sharpening your oyster knife and writing your truth and bearing it all and bearing witness. And it reminds me of a --- Carvell forced me to show you guys images,

Carvell Wallace (03:04):

Which if you're not familiar with Sadie’s work, please get familiar with Sadie's work. There's a reason I asked Sadie to be the person who does this with me…

Sadie Barnette (03:09):

Because there's a lot of overlap, but there's one image of a drawing that it says "More alive."

And to me, the full thought is "the worse it gets, the more alive I feel." I only put the second part in the drawing because it's sort of like you can bring whatever it is to it that makes you feel more alive, but for me it's the worst it gets. And I'm like, all right, I'm very strapped in and very attuned in this horrible time.

Carvell Wallace (03:37):

Well, what I love about that more live drawing is that it's the Newport cigarettes font that you use. What's that font called again?

Sadie Barnette (03:46):

It's called Cooper Black.

Carvell Wallace (03:47):

Cooper Black. That's the one. And there's some of that in this book, which I did not arrange. They, that's just what they chose, and I love that font. But we grew up, if you grew up in the hood, you grew up with those Newport ads everywhere. They were always encouraging you as a Black person to smoke Newports and to be more refreshed and have more fun and whatever. And it was always in that same font. And so part of what I like about that piece is that it takes on the architecture of a billboard, it's encouraging you to do something, but it forces you to have a little media literacy about what it means and what it doesn't mean. It's very advertis-arial if that's a word. And I like that.

Sadie Barnette (04:26):

Should be. Yeah. I always think of that font also as iron on letters

Carvell Wallace (04:32):

In those a seventies, eighties.

Sadie Barnette (04:34):

Yeah, like DIY, little league t-shirts, posters,

Carvell Wallace (04:38):

A little fuzzy

Sadie Barnette (04:39):

When you need to make meaning or make a sign, it's like an available font.

Carvell Wallace (04:44):

Was it the Comic Sans of the seventies and eighties? Dare I say...?

Sadie Barnette (04:47):

No. It was never the Comic Sans of anything. Sorry, Cooper is offended. I hope that person that makes the memes about the fonts arguing. Well, one question that I had about the book just sort of selfishly was where you wrote most of it.

Carvell Wallace (05:06):

Oh,

Sadie Barnette (05:07):

I'm just trying to,

Carvell Wallace (05:08):

That's, wow, there you go. Right away with a question that no one has asked me, it's hard to remember. It was a blur, actually. I wrote a lot of it in my old apartment, which was a somewhat small space that had what I call a "cloffice." It was like a big closet that doubled as an office. So I wrote a lot of it in the cloffice, and some of it was during pandemic. Much of it was, and this is, it's like five and a half feet from my bed. So I would get out of bed in the morning and then I would go over to the cloffice and sit down and write. And I was like, God, my life sucks. I feel like a hamster in a cage. But I did a lot of it there because that's where I was.

(05:53):

When I was lucky enough, I was able to go up to a friend's property up in Bodega Bay. Their parents have a house there, and I did some big swaths of writing there. And that was great because the presence of nature, there were, I had encounters with animals up there -- skunks. There was a whole skunk standoff that happened one day. And there were all kinds of mystical birds and Turkey buzzards and of course the ocean. I was up there alone for a lot of it. So just the silence was first annoying, then frightening, then wonderful, then deafening, then enlivening. I fell trying to go see a sunset at one point and severely injured my wrist and finger. I was all by myself. And so I was confronted with ... and there's also -- because I grew up mostly in southern California and the ocean represents something different up here --to me, the ocean up here always makes me think of death. There's something unforgiving about the ocean up here, the rocks, the cold, the fog. And so when I was up in Bodega Bay and driving around, maybe I'm going to go up to some other town to get some fish or something, the fog would roll in and I would be on these windy roads and I would feel very present with the possibility of my death and all the deaths that have happened. And that also, it gave the book an urgency and a clarity, but it was between those two places. I wasn't able to write a lot in cafes for this book because it was way too distracting.

Sadie Barnette (07:34):

So very tiny space and the Pacific Ocean

Carvell Wallace (07:38):

The edge of the abject.

Sadie Barnette (07:40):

That makes sense.

Carvell Wallace (07:42):

Yeah,

Sadie Barnette (07:43):

I see that. Another thing -- I just kind of feel like maybe a lot of people in this room have read the book, so I wasn't necessarily introducing it -- but there are a lot of ways that one could...I mean, this book is about harm. It's about mending, it's about sex, it's about masculinity, it's about endings, it's about music, it's about time. It's about a texture of stucco and corn nuts and cartoons and just so, so many things. And I think a big part of it to me at the end is a very compelling case for why we need each other and why one of the best things that we can do for each other is to be ourselves, whoever the hell we happen to be, whoever we've become, however we've gotten here. And I remember wanting to ask you when I was reading it, and now I get to, I was like, okay, I understand why it's worth it to be ourselves and to be you in particular, but how do you know ...

Carvell Wallace (09:10):

What yourself is?

Sadie Barnette (09:11):

Yeah.

Carvell Wallace (09:18):

Well, I think the book is about all that stuff, but what I think it's really about is how to regain your full humanity after parts of it have been taken from you by your circumstances. And it's not only about how, it's also an argument for why that's necessary, which I think gets to your question. I have come to believe, --been shown or whatever -- it's come to me that life is weird. It doesn't make any sense. You are born, then a bunch of stuff happens to you, then you're die. And it's like, okay, well what was that supposed to be? And somewhere along the line I realized that you try to make meaning out of that. But for me, the meaning has to be -- have kind of a low tolerance for bullshit, unfortunately, which doesn't serve me super well moving through the world, especially this culture.

(10:16):

But it makes me...I get exhausted and I get annoyed, and it's hard for me to hide how I feel when I feel like someone is full of shit. So it's hard for me to buy into things that don't feel sustainable as a purpose. And so the idea of trying to be heal, to see to one's healing so that you can be a better person in the world so that you can help ameliorate some of the suffering that everyone else is going through so that you can help alleviate this... just everyone's got... like… you have to go through shit to get out of your bed and to get to the end of the day, it's really bad. It's hard. And if you're here and you have an impact on people, then that impact should be something that helps as opposed to makes that worse for people. Now how do you do that as a lifelong question that you have to work to get better at it. You're born knowing how to do that, and then people abuse you and assault you, and then you forget how to do that, and then you have to spend the rest of your life learning how to do that again is what I think. And so... wait, what was your question?