Episode 533
with Kaveh Akbar, Danielle Henderson, and Deep Sea Diver
Host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello remember the things we were better at as children; celebrated poet Kaveh Akbar explains how learning Farsi as his first language shaped his poetic sense of the English language; writer Danielle Henderson (Feminist Ryan Gosling) unpacks her memoir The Ugly Cry and how her iconoclastic grandmother helped forge her own fiercely independent path; and indie rock group Deep Sea Diver performs "Impossible Weight," the title track off their newest album.
Kaveh Akbar
Poet
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges. His latest collection, Pilgrim Bell, explores everything from recovery from addiction as well as making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation. Website • Instagram
Danielle Henderson
Writer
Danielle Henderson is a TV writer whose credits include Maniac, Divorce, and Difficult People. A retired freelance writer and former editor for Rookie, she has been published by The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Cut. A book based on her popular website, Feminist Ryan Gosling, was released in 2012. Danielle currently co-hosts the podcast I Saw What You Did with Millie De Chirico about the weird ways we respond to and learn to love movies. The Associated Press calls her memoir The Ugly Cry “equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking… as it examines the complexity of identity, family, childhood, and independence." Website • Instagram
Deep Sea Diver
Indie Rock Group
Deep Sea Diver is a Seattle-based four-piece led by prodigious guitarist and front woman Jessica Dobson, who previously played lead guitar for Beck and The Shins. Their third full-length album, Impossible Weight, features guest vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Jessica’s trademark radical vulnerability. The band has received acclaim for their festival-ready power and presence, larger than life guitar hooks, and their cascading layers that build upon each other until they reach their explosive peak.
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Luke Burbank Hey there, Elena.
Elena Passarello Hey. Hey, Luke. How's it going?
Luke Burbank It's going very well. It's very soggy around here in the Pacific Northwest. But I guess, you know, it's that time of year. Luckily, it's warm and dry here inside the radio show, and it is time for us to take part in the long running tradition of "station location identification examination." Are you ready for that?
Elena Passarello Let's do it.
Luke Burbank All right. I'm going to give Elena some info on a place in the country or on the radio, and she's got to guess the place I'm talking about. It is the home or it's the birth place, anyway, of the rapper Yung Gravy.
Elena Passarello I don't even know Old Gravy, which is the oldest joke you can tell.
Luke Burbank You don't mess with Yung Gravy on the TikTok?
Elena Passarello I honestly don't believe that Yung Gravy is real.
Luke Burbank Let me give you the hint that I think we'll give it to you. It's also the home of the Mayo Clinic. It's known as the Med City because of that.
Elena Passarello Oh, it's in Minnesota.
Luke Burbank It sure is.
Elena Passarello Rochester, Minnesota.
Luke Burbank It's exactly Rochester, Minnesota.
Elena Passarello That's where Yung Gravy's from?
Luke Burbank Yeah, it's the Med City and also the birthplace of Yung Gravy.
Elena Passarello Oh, it'd be great if like, Bob Dylan was also from there. And you pick Yung Gravy.
Luke Burbank You've got the whole lifecycle of popular music in America. We've got Bob Dylan all the way to Yung Gravy there in Rochester. That's where on the radio on KZSE Radio in Rochester, Minnesota. So shout out to everybody listening there. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello Let's do it.
Luke Burbank All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello From PRX, it's...
Audience Live Wire!
Elena Passarello This week, poet Kaveh Akbar.
Kaveh Akbar Linguists teach us that the language that you speak, the languages that you learn, sort of terraform your brain and shape the way that you think, right? And so my brain is sort of terraformed for a way of thinking that I kind of don't quite have access to.
Elena Passarello And writer Danielle Henderson.
Danielle Henderson You know, I had a very low self-esteem, but I weirdly didn't have a lack of confidence.
Elena Passarello With music from Deep Sea Diver and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello. And now the host of Live Wire: Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over the country, including Rochester, Minnesota, birthplace of Yung Gravy. We have a great show in store for you this week. We, of course, asked Live Wire listeners a question, which is what is something you were better at as a child? Which kind of ties in to some of our guests today. We're going to read those responses coming up later on in the show. In the meantime, we, of course, have to kick things off with the best news we heard all week. This is our little reminder at the top of the show that there is some good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what's the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello Ooh, hot news from Tucson, Arizona. Hot news about cool nights at the hottest new nightclub in town.
Luke Burbank I love this character. Whoever it is you're exploring with, I'm into it.
Elena Passarello Well, you know, when I was a kid, nightclubs sounded so interesting to me because of the way that they were talked about on the radio.
Luke Burbank Oh, my gosh. There was one called CI Shenanigans that I used to hear ads for. I think the health department closed it before I was of age. But man, I would have killed to go to CI Shenanigans.
Elena Passarello But it is I mean, I think in both of our experiences, we grew up kind of thinking, you know, one day I'm going to go to a nightclub. Yeah. And that's kind of where this story begins with a mother and an activist named Crisann Black in Tucson, who is a disability advocate. She's a career accessibility manager. She also does a lot of great work making sure that folks experiencing homelessness can have hygiene resources. And she also has a four year old son named Zeus who has autism. And she's always thinking about ways in which she can make her community better for people on the margins. And she has come up with a really rack and way to do it. Her latest invention is Club Zeus, a nightclub for anybody, 18 and up with a disability and their families who wants to come to the Tucson area and party down.
Luke Burbank Nice.
Elena Passarello It seems like a really, really fun nightclub. They have an event the second Saturday of every month for the past few months. Folks show up, according to Crisann Black decked out. DJ Shorty spins the hits. There's dancing, karaoke. One night there was speed dating. There's mocktails and pizza. There's games. And the whole kind of like energy behind this is that the folks who go are safe to be who they are, to explore, to socialize, to have a good time without any other contexts inhibiting that safety and that freedom. They have a lovely Instagram page that recently showcased photos from their Halloween costume contest. 125 people came to that meeting of Club Zeus. There's maybe going to be some pop ups happening in other places in Arizona, and I just love this idea. It started a few months ago, Crisann of course had her son in mind. He's only four, but eventually, she says he might want to have this kind of social experience and she doesn't want him to have any barriers to any experience about which he feels curious. The main goal, she says, is for folks to leave Club Zeus feeling like a rock star.
Luke Burbank This sounds like better than any nightclub I've actually been to where you're mostly trying to not be yourself.
Elena Passarello Right!
Luke Burbank And debate. If it's worth paying $500 to have a table you can sit at because you know, there's some kind of fancy like, have you ever been to a club in Vegas? You will not leave there feeling like a rock star. You will leave there feeling way worse about yourself.
Elena Passarello You have to pay $500 to sit down at a table?
Luke Burbank Me and my friends accidentally ended up in one of those one time, and it was... it was a special ring of hell. I'd much rather go to Club Zeus.
Elena Passarello Yeah, the cover there is ten bucks and they take cash app, so you know, much easier.
Luke Burbank The story that I saw this week that I thought was pretty great involved a town called Kirkland, Washington, which is just outside of Seattle. It's the reason that, like a lot of the jeans and vodka that people buy is called Kirkland because it's also where they started Costco.
Elena Passarello Kirkland Pizza, yeah!
Luke Burbank Right. Well, there is a restaurant that's been in Kirkland forever. It's called Cafe Juanita. It's an Italian restaurant. And the owner of Cafe Juanita, a woman named Holly Smith, had been looking out from this, restaurant's been there for, like 22 years, at this creek that's right behind the restaurant, it's Juanita Creek. And in the 22 years that Holly Smith had been running this restaurant, she said she had seen a total of one salmon swim through the creek, one.
Elena Passarello One lonely, lost salmon.
Luke Burbank And so she decided that this was something that she wanted to work on. And so she reached out to a couple of local organizations, one called Adopt a Stream and one called the King Conservation District. And she said, What can I do to fix up this like 100 feet of the bank of this stream that's part of my property? And so they wrote for some grants. They came out, they did a bunch of stuff, they tied a bunch of logs together. They chained these stumps up on the bank, and then they put boulders and things in the water, which creates like a like a rest stop for the fish. So fish get tired swimming and they need to kind of chill out somewhere. And if the river doesn't have any little kind of nooks and crannies.
Elena Passarello Where there's less current?
Luke Burbank Yeah. So they can kind of pull off in between these boulders and these logs. Also the stumps on the shore. They stop erosion because when the river fills up with like silt and erosion, that's harder on the fish. These folks pulled out some invasive plant species. This is the amazing part. So they worked on this for like a year, doing all this different kind of remediation and stuff. The day that they finished up, this is what Holly Smith said. She goes the moment Adopt a Stream left, they left on a Thursday morning, we came out there and there were 15 to 20 fish lined up.
Elena Passarello What?!
Luke Burbank She goes, I thought, this is not real. Someone has stocked the stream with these fish. But it was just one of those things that made that much difference.
Elena Passarello Wow.
Luke Burbank And this is something that people can do. It doesn't have to be particularly expensive. A lot of this particular creek is is the bank is privately owned. So it actually falls on the people who own the property to kind of do this sort of stuff. But it sounds like a lot of it can be done fairly simply. It's just about taking the time and thinking about the fish.
Elena Passarello That's great. Have you ever seen a fish ladder before?
Luke Burbank Uh huh. Sure.
Elena Passarello They used to have one in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That was like where I took everyone who visited me because it's really fun to see watch them climb stairs.
Luke Burbank I mean, the Ballard Locks in Seattle, that fish ladder. It just gives you a real appreciation for the life of a fish. It ain't easy out there for them.
Elena Passarello Thank goodness people are making it a little easier.
Luke Burbank Exactly. That's I think that's the best news I've heard this week is some people are looking out for the fish. All right. Let's welcome our first guest on over to Live Wire. This week. He was crowned poetry's number one cheerleader by NPR. His latest collection, Pilgrim Bell, received rave reviews from The New Yorker, Time Magazine and The Washington Post. Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Kaveh Akbar, recorded in front of a live audience last year at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland. Welcome to the show.
Kaveh Akbar Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Luke Burbank This book is is really intriguing and your use of language in it is really amazing. And then I found out that you were actually born in Iran and that you spoke Farsi as your first language. Came over here at about two and a half, but your parents insisted on speaking English. How did that start to shape your kind of relationship with language?
Kaveh Akbar Yeah. Thank you for for asking and for having me here. I'm so honored to be here with both of you. Yeah, when we came to America, my brother is seven years older than I am, and so he was immediately thrust into American schools and English as a second language classes weren't than what they are now. You know, I mean, it's hard enough now, but back then, he was just in a regular old fifth grade classroom. And so in an effort to acclimate him to school, they banned speaking Farsi in the household, which was my first language. And so consequently, we learned English really fast. And, I mean, I became a poet. I became a writer. You know, it worked, right? But I also sort of lost my relationship to Farsi or I lost that sort of fluency with Farsi, you know? So it's weird. You know, linguists teach us that the language that you speak, the languages that you learn, sort of terraform your brain and shape the way that you think. Right. And so my brain is sort of terraformed for a way of thinking that I kind of don't quite have access to.
Luke Burbank Like the blueprint is Farsi, right? But they built a different house on it.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is interesting. I mean, there's like a kind of defamiliarist potential there where I'm sort of like staring at everything a little bit cockeyed.
Luke Burbank But it gives you an amazing perspective.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah.
Luke Burbank Yeah, it comes through in the book.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah, and I think that it foregrounded language being a medium. You know, my brother went to school to be an engineer and does computer-y stuff now and but, you know, he loved Legos, you know, and he would stick Legos together. And I feel like language was my that, you know, in the exact same way that he would, like get a, you know, make a spaceship with these 200 blocks and then he would turn it into like a house or vice versa. Right. Like, I would get some language and I would be like, well, it says that it's supposed to be this, but actually it looks like this to me, you know, and it's highlighted the materiality of language.
Elena Passarello Were you writing poems like a little young person?
Kaveh Akbar I was. I was, yeah. My mom has poems that I wrote from, you know, when I was four or five years old. My first poem, we lived all over the place, but I lived in Milwaukee for a spell. And my first published poem was called A Packer Poem.
Luke Burbank About the Green Bay Packers?
Kaveh Akbar About the Green Bay Packers. Yeah, it was published in the it was published in the local paper. I don't remember a lot about the poem, but I remember the last line was because the fans and the players are brothers by Kaveh Ackbar second grade, you know, in Mrs. Parks class, you know. So I really peaked early. You know.
Elena Passarello That had to come in handy when you wrote poems as a five year old for that movie, The Kindergarten Teacher. That Maggie Gyllenhaal movie.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah. Yeah. So I wrote poems for, as you said, with with the poem Ocean Vuong and the poet Dominique Townsend. We wrote poems for this movie, The Kindergarten Teacher, which was directed by Sara Colangelo and starring and produced by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Luke Burbank It's about a very incredibly gifted child poet.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah. Sort of precocious five year old poet. Right. And so Ocean and I wrote the poems for this, like five year old poetry prodigy. And it was a it's a really interesting constraint, right, to write sort of like formally interesting poems using only vernacular that would be native to a five year old. Because it's not like we couldn't be out here being like I'm ambiguous about whether I want the cheese crackers or the peanut butter, you know, like, you know, like you you have to use vernacular that's sort of native to a five year old's idiom. Right. But you also have to do sort of formally interesting literary poetry. So it's kind of it's kind of like writing a sonnet or something. You're writing within a received form, right?
Luke Burbank This is Live Wire from PRX. We're listening to a conversation we had with Kaveh Akbar back in 2021 about his poetry collection. Pilgrim Bell, we've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We've got much more coming up. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm your host, Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to an interview that we conducted with the poet Kaveh Akbar, recorded in front of a live audience in Portland back in 2021. Take a listen. Can we hear a poem from the book? I wonder if you could read Reza's Restaurant, Chicago, 1997?
Kaveh Akbar Sure, yeah. Growing up in the Midwest, there weren't a lot of Iranian anythings around. And so we would take these yearly pilgrimages to the one persian restaurant, like within a six hour driving radius. So this is Reza's Restaurant, Chicago, 1997. The waiters milled about filling sumac shakers, clearing away plates of onion and radish. My father pointed to each person, whispered Persian about the old man with the silver beard, whispered Arab about the woman with the eye mole. Persian. The teenager pouring water. White. The man on the phone. I was eight, still soft as a thumb and amazed. I asked how he could possibly tell when they were all brown skinned, dark haired, like us. Almost everyone in the restaurant looked like us. He smiled, a proud little smile, a warm nest of lips said. It's easy, said. We're just uglier. He returned to his lamb, but I was baffled. Hardly touched my gheimeh. I had big glasses and bad teeth. I felt plenty Persian. When the woman with light eyes and blond brown hair left our check. My father looked at me. I said, Arab. He shook his head, laughed. We drove home. I grew up. It took years to put together what my father meant. That day, my father, who listened exclusively to the Rolling Stones, who called the Beatles a band for girls. My father, who wore only black, even around the house, whose umbrella made it rain, whose arms could cut chicken wire and make stew and bulged with old farm scars. My father, my father, my father built the world. The first sound I ever heard was his voice whispering the azan in my right ear. I didn't need anything else. My father cherished that we were ugly, and so being ugly was blessed. I smiled with all my teeth.
Luke Burbank Kaveh Akbar. Wow. Was that a big part of your childhood growing up in the U.S., but being Iranian, the sense of who was and wasn't like you?
Kaveh Akbar Yeah. And it's and it's wild because now I have that, you know, like now I have that sort of like sonar, you know, like I'm like, Oh, they're Jordanian and they're Yemeni and, you know, and like, they're Iranian, you know, like, I can really, like, sense it and I don't know what it is. And it really took me a long time to unpack. You know, he said they're just uglier. And, you know, me being like a sort of self-conscious little kid, I was like, Oh, well, that sucks, you know, like it sucks for me, you know? But the sort of ugliness was like when you talk about gratitude made wise by having known loss, you know, which I think that we've all experienced a lot of in these past 18 months. It's that sort of ugliness, you know, like it's almost like a weariness or, you know, there's just like a sort of granularity or there's like a grain in the facial. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how to talk about it, but I get it, you know, and it makes complete sense to me that like he who, you know, thought Mick Jagger was the coolest person on the planet Earth, but like, you know, thought Paul McCartney was like, you know, not for him, you know, like. Like, it makes sense to me that this would be what he valorized as a very, very self-conscious kid. It took a long time to sort of settle into embracing that sort of ugliness, like what he was calling ugliness.
Luke Burbank This book is titled Pilgrim Bell. And I think there's like six poems that are that are the poems themselves are titled Pilgrim Bell. Why did you choose to do that?
Kaveh Akbar Yeah, well, it's sort of like the ringing of a bell, right? Like, it reverberates. There's something about the bell that interests me. Just broadly speaking, a bell is like a sort of spiritual technology that moves from the weight of a human body. You know, you pull the rope and the bell sort of clings, right. And it makes this sound, it's a spiritual sound, right? It's like a call to prayer. It's a call to worship. It's whatever that may be. Right. But it's it's the heft of the human body that makes it move right. And sometimes, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but like if you've ever, like, tugged on one of those really old bells, it'll actually lift you up. That that was really interesting to me when I'm thinking about poetry as a kind of spiritual technology that might thin the partition between me and whatever the divine that I might hope to address with it might be whether that divine is like a capital G God or my dad or my country or my beloved, or my loneliness or justice or, you know, whatever, whatever that divine might be in any given iteration. I think that the technology of the poem helps thin that partition for me.
Elena Passarello When you were talking about the body, it made me think about those of us who are here and got to see you reading the poem. That poem was in your body like there was a, there was a rotational force to reciting it, not just your voice, but a poetry book, the book that I read in order to come here. I didn't have that experience. You know, I read that poem as this still, you know, type faced thing. So how do you make the transference from having this poem that sort of lives in your body to the page? Or is it like vise versa? Like you put it on the page and then you find a place for it in your body?
Kaveh Akbar Yeah. That's such a beautiful and perceptive question and one that I don't know that I, I mean, that's a very sort of here be dragons kind of question. You know, I wish, I mean, I could sort of I could sort of, you know, lay some language.
Luke Burbank This is the part of the show. I pretend I know what everyone's talking about.
Kaveh Akbar Me, too. Me too. No, truly. But, you know, like. Like you're literate, right? Like you're capable of, like, I wrote this book, I can hand it to you, and you can read these poems, and I can read out loud the poems in your book. Right. But, but the reason that we ask the person who wrote the poem to read them out loud is that you're hoping that they might be able to connect with some of the catalytic energy that brought the poem into the world in the first place.
Elena Passarello Right. Like a band.
Kaveh Akbar Exactly. Exactly right. Like. Like we can all sing "Let It Be" right. But when you hear, I don't know why I'm stuck on this like Beatles thing. But, you know, like, we can all sing this song, right? But, like, there's there's like a timbre in the voice of the person who wrote it, right? That allows them to access something in the catalytic experience of having written that. Right. And so like there's something in, like there's something in me reading this poem that, you know, if the reading is optimal, allows me to reconnect with whatever that spark was that kind of ignited the poem's entrance into the world, you know what I'm saying?
Elena Passarello Yeah.
Luke Burbank Can we actually get another poem from the book? Could you read How Prayer Works?
Kaveh Akbar Yeah, yeah. How Prayer Works. Tucked away in our tiny bedroom so near each other. The edge of my prayer rug covered the edge of his. My brother and I prayed. We were 18 and 11, maybe, or 19 and 12. He was back from college where he built his own computer and girls kissed him on the mouth. I was barely anything. Just wanted to be left alone to read and watch The Simpsons. We prayed together, as we had done thousands of times, rushing ablutions over the sink, laying our janamazes out toward the window facing the elm, which one summer held an actual crow's nest full of baby crows, fuzzy black beaked fruit. They were miracles. We did not think to treasure. My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us. The room was so small, our twin bed took up nearly all of it. And as my brother, tall and endless, moved to kneel, his foot caught the coiled brass doorstop which issued forth a loud brooong. The noise crashed around the room like a long, wet bullet shredding through porcelain. My brother bit back a smirk and I tried to stifle a snort. But solemnity ignored our pleas. We erupted, laughter quaking out our faces into our bodies and through the floor. We were hopeless, laughing at our laughing. Our glee, an infinite rope fraying off in every direction. It's not that we forgot God or the martyrs or the Prophet's holy word. Quite the opposite. In fact, we were boys built to love what was right in front of our faces. My brother and I draped across each other, laughing tears into our prayer rugs.
Luke Burbank Kaveh Akbar reading from Pilgrim Bell. I think NPR described you as poetry's number one cheerleader because you started this really great poetry website and you wrote a poetry column for The Paris Review. I guess I'm curious, why does poetry need a cheerleader? Like you never hear someone as fiction's number one cheerleader?
Elena Passarello So you don't.
Luke Burbank Like the reaction in this room to you reading that is as powerful as any reaction we get for any reading. And yet poetry is this thing where it's like everyone's really hoping good things for poetry.
Kaveh Akbar Yeah, I don't know. To be honest, I don't really know what that is either. I think poetry is doing just fine. You know, the earliest attributable author in human literature is Enheduanna who wrote in 2300 BCE, which means that for 43 centuries it's been doing just fine. And, you know, and it has existed millennia before me, and it will continue long after the last person has forgotten my name. So I don't I don't know what that is. That sort of like, you know, I used to be a middle school teacher and it was the same sort of like, oh, that's so good of you. You know, like, like that sort of like kind of weird condescension. And I will say that it is a profound privilege to be able to be of service to that which I love best in this world, which is poetry. I think that that's a great way to spend a life is sort of joyfully serving that what you love best. But but yeah, I mean, if I disappeared from the face of the earth, poetry would be just fine, you know?
Luke Burbank Well, we hope you don't disappear too soon, because this is a great book, and we look forward to the next one. It's Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar. Thanks for coming on Live Wire.
Kaveh Akbar Thanks so much, Luke. Thanks Elena.
Luke Burbank That was Kaveh Akbar right here on Live Wire. His collection of poems, Pilgrim Bell is available now, and since we last spoke to Kaveh, he's also edited a book of poetry called The Penguins Book of Spiritual Verse 110 Poets on the Divine. So make sure to check that out. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco, and as a member of the OneWorld alliance. Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at AlaskaAir.com. This is Live Wire. Of course, each week we ask our listeners a question. This week we asked, What's something you were better at as a child? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello I love this one from Tracy. Tracy says, I used to hustle all the neighbors by selling them my quote unquote art work. I don't think that would go over well now.
Luke Burbank There are a lot of kids scams like that. Like my sisters would always put on plays, but then they would charge admission. And also attendance was mandatory, which felt like kind of a rub.
Elena Passarello I used to charge people to let me take their dogs over to my house. We didn't have a dog so I could put on a dog show with them and I'd just have a bunch of dogs in my house. So my mom would come home and be like, you know, you're fired from being my child.
Luke Burbank All right. What's another thing that one of our listeners were better at as children?
Elena Passarello This one is pretty fabulous from Dana. Dana says, I could do an impression of a kitten meowing so realistically that it fooled our cats and our German shepherd. They would look for the kitten. But if I try it now, it kills my voice for 2 hours. I just love how specific that is. It also sounds like maybe this was not that long ago. In the past, if we're dealing with the same pets here.
Luke Burbank So that's a that's I think a really useful skill. You know, I talk incessantly on the show about my cat and if I could create the sound of another cat so as to, like, distract her when she's attacking me or just sort of, I don't know, get her interested in something that would be really useful. I don't have that ability.
Elena Passarello You ever try to hiss at her?
Luke Burbank Now I try blowing on her face like a baby. You know how you make a baby? Stop crying with that also does not work for them.
Elena Passarello No.
Luke Burbank All right. What's one last thing that one of our listeners was better at when they were younger?
Elena Passarello All right, I'm with Alicia on this one. Alicia, as a kid, was better at making mixtapes. It was harder because it was analog and the stakes were higher. But what a rush to fit that one last song in before the tape ran out. Spotify has endless possibilities, and indecision gets me every time. Oh, I always had, like, my killer track, too, you know, like, oh, yeah, the ending, the goofball track. And I have to remember, like, what songs I put on the last mixtape. And then you got to handwrite a little card that goes inside the cassette.
Luke Burbank I was never that thoughtful about it. I was the person just trying to record the song off the radio that I liked. So there'll always be like 3 seconds of the deejay and then like the beginning of a like auto dealership ad at the end of it, like I was pretty sloppy with my mix-tapery, but I sure do miss that. I mean, that was a very fun thing to get to be a part of.
Elena Passarello Yeah. And receiving one. Was there anything better?
Luke Burbank It was a real love language back in the day. All right. Thanks to everybody who sent in a response to our listener question. We've got one coming up for next week's show, which we will talk about at the end of today's episode. In the meantime, though, let's bring our next guest on over. She's a television writer and creator of the very popular Feminist Ryan Gosling Tumblr page. The Associated Press called her latest book, it's a memoir, it's called The Ugly Cry, "equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking as it examines the complexity of identity, family, childhood and independence." Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Danielle Henderson, recorded as part of last year's Portland Book Festival. This book is is really incredible, Danielle. It's so moving. And it's also so funny because your voice is so is so great and kind of inimitable in it. If we're going to sort of talk about the themes of of love and loss, though, I guess in this book, the kind of loss part is the loss of your mother when you were a child, not that she died, but that she kind of abandoned you and your brother. And then the love part would be your grandmother, who is really the central character in the book, aside from you, I guess, and had a really unique grandmotherly manner, her way of showing love or of like not seeming to show it. Can you kind of like describe her personality?
Danielle Henderson It is. It's completely accurate and completely okay to point out that I am not the star of my own memoir. She absolutely is. She is the toughest person I've ever met. She's a little bit of a maniac. She loves horror movies. She is, she's obviously always been exactly who she is and encouraged me to do the same and kind of didn't let me rest on my laurels at all. And even though she didn't quite understand fully what I was experiencing as a child, she was a very steady hand in my in my life. And I love her. I love her a lot. She's 88 now and she has dementia. And I just bought a house and moved home so that she could live with me. So.
Elena Passarello Wow.
Danielle Henderson Yeah, I bought a little farm.
Luke Burbank I see that on Twitter and we need more videos. I just saw a video of you dragging a log through a field which was like it was like a moment of zen. So if you could start to update the content. That would really be awesome, Danielle.
Danielle Henderson You got it. I mean, it's winter, so that's happening on a regular basis now. But yeah, she really she stepped in in a way that I didn't know that I needed and I had never seen before. So when I was growing up, it felt like wildly out of place to have my grandmother be my primary parent, but also to be, again, like like borderline insane. She is a wild one. And she, I think, had to learn a lot of lessons herself and how to survive in the world and the way that she passed them down to me was kind of weird, but they were completely necessary and allowed me to be a fully realized and totally independent person way before most people I knew.
Elena Passarello I love in the book when you call her the love of your life, and it was great to hear all these moments where, you know, even though it's kind of the nineties, your parental figure is letting you own your body. You know, you shave your head, she's all right with it, even though she gives you a lot of sass about it. And what kinds of things do you think you're sort of still carrying from the upbringing from this incredibly iconoclastic figure?
Danielle Henderson I think it is exactly that kind of thing where I fully live and inhabit my body because I've always had from her, from from that perspective, I've always had control over what I wanted to do. And I remember saying and I did include this story in the book, but when I was very young, like, you know, seven years old, and we were walking to school and I told her I didn't want to have kids. And she was like, What are you talking about? What do you even know about kids? And I'm like, absolutely not. Not doing this. And she never pushed me. She never pushed me. There are a lot of people I know who decided they didn't want children and their families were not okay with that decision. But my family never made me feel bad about that. And, you know, yeah, there's things like the tattoos and and stuff, stuff that I've done that I later regretted and maybe should have listened to some of that advice. You know, I had a very low self-esteem, but I weirdly didn't have a lack of confidence. And it's a strange mix, very strange friction to live with. But I knew that it was okay and maybe even better for me to be who I wanted to be, even if it was out of place and out of step with the world most of the time.
Luke Burbank I'm curious, you know, your grandmother was somebody who seems at least the way that you write about her in a way deeply, I don't want to say not sympathetic, but she just seemed to not be somebody who was overly coddling of you or demonstrative in this, what we think of as the grandmotherly way. She had a really different vibe. Do you think some of that was to mask the fact that she felt a lot of things really deeply, but it was just felt more tolerable for her to kind of just be tough on you?
Danielle Henderson I do think so. And and she was mean.
Luke Burbank Maybe I was trying to sugarcoat it. I mean, she says some pretty mean things to you in the book.
Danielle Henderson She was flat out mean and often cruel.
Luke Burbank I was really trying to kind of soft pedal it there and I maybe went too far.
Danielle Henderson I appreciate that diplomacy, but no, she was really mean. And what's bizarre is that now she's in the space where, you know, because of her dementia, she regresses a lot and there's a lot of emotional fluctuation in her day. And she's so much more vulnerable than she's ever been. She didn't want us, you know, her kids, her grandkids. She didn't want any of us to grow up in a world where we felt like we had to believe any of the racism that was being thrown at us. And she wanted us to be smart and strong and capable. And I think that her way of doing that was to try to fortify that emotional life and try to make it crystal clear that, you know, you are who you depend on. And if you have to clean your side of the street and you have to keep yourself in check because the world won't do it for you, which is a heartbreaking lesson to learn as a kid. I wish I had a few more years before I learned that lesson, but it was accurate. It was really true. And I think, again, it set me on a path to self-sufficiency that I that I appreciate for for sure.
Luke Burbank Most of your childhood was spent in Warwick, New York, or at least a lot of the parts you write about in this book where you as a Black person were very much in the minority. What I thought was interesting about this memoir, though, is certainly you have some stories in there of really awful things happening and other ways that you were sort of othered. But I also kind of feel like race, did your experience as a Black person didn't seem to be the most central part of the book, or at least the only part of the book. Did I read that right? Like, how did you want that to fit into what you were doing?
Danielle Henderson Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's it's a a kind of a, I don't want to say it's a flaw that I have, but I'm very quick to always say, well, other people have it worse than I did. You know, like, I don't like to I don't ever want to be the mouthpiece or the spokesperson for a particular kind of experience or emotion, because other people feel things more deeply and have deeper issues than I've had. However, my race in this town and growing up in a town where I was so distinctly othered, felt, made me feel powerless. And I didn't. In order to kind of regain some of my power and regain some of my own, you know, my my ability to kind of connect with my own race, I have I had to reframe my own narrative a little bit in my life. And so when it came to writing this book, I realized that the things that affected me and this, again, is not to say racism didn't affect me deeply. It absolutely did and continues to. But I really wanted to focus more on the kind of stories I've never really read before, which is, you know, a young black girl who has depression, who has a different family structure and who has other things contributing to that. And, you know, racism is something that just contributes to that. So I tended to focus more on those other elements because it's it's a story that I hadn't seen before that I was interested in.
Luke Burbank I think it's interesting that you have become a successful TV writer and somebody who's really known for your ability to kind of blend pop culture and academic criticism with Feminist Ryan Gosling. When the maybe the anecdote that was most one of the more powerful anecdotes in the book to me was trying to watch TV when you were a kid and your mom coming home and opening the door and going, Were you watching TV? And you say No. And then she goes and feels the back of the TV because that was exactly the move my dad, Walter Burbank, would always do. And that was so universal to me. It's it's interesting that even though there were there were rules around using the electricity when the adults were there and stuff like that sounds like pop culture was still a hugely important part of your life. As a as a kid growing up, what did it mean to you and what did it do for you?
Danielle Henderson Absolutely huge. And I think, again, that's something that my family cultivated within me, because music, first and foremost, was a very important part of my family structure. You know, getting together on a Saturday, cleaning the house. You put the Donna Summer album on, and then I'm looking at the whole album cover and wondering what's going on. And it was a huge part of my family life to have music be everywhere. And I didn't learn this fact until I was in my mid mid-thirties. But my great grandfather played piano during the Harlem Renaissance and he was a big jazz pianist and he was engaged to Billie Holiday, to Billie Holiday. So we put on these jazz records and, you know, nobody said anything. But now I have, I have a couple of his albums. Yeah, that was kind of like my entry point, but also because my grandmother loves movies, she would do anything to make sure that she could watch whatever movie she wanted. And we just got the the benefit of that. So we always had HBO. We always had MTV. And she I think that was kind of the way that she related to the modern world. So we would watch MTV together and she didn't like any of it, but it was how she kind of related to what was going on in the world. So I was really free to develop my own pop culture identity. So yeah, I think it was kind of great that that I had that experience because pop culture saved my life when I was a kid. You know, I write very deeply about the magazine Sassy, and it's because it really did. I mean, it was it's hard to convey to people who now have the Internet at their fingertips. But when you're a little weird black kid in Warwick, New York and it means the world to open a magazine and see people discussing the things that are interesting to you, who look like you, who encourage you and support you. So I think that pop culture became a big part of my love language, you know, for myself and I have always been deeply entrenched in it could not tell you anything happening recently, like I have now, I've crossed over. I feel like I've gone to the shadow of land where, you know, somebody will mention an actor in a movie. And I'm like, huh, who, what? I have no idea who anybody is anymore.
Luke Burbank We've already mentioned it a few times, but for the, you know, ten people who aren't aware of sort of what it is, what is the Feminist Ryan Gosling blog and then book? What were you seeking to do there?
Danielle Henderson I was seeking to survive my my master's degree program, which is so heavily theoretical and not fun at all. And it was my homework. So I would read these theories and read these theorists and want to remember them and try to remember them. And I just wanted to have some fun with it. So I created a Tumblr and you know, Ryan Gosling was kind of in the zeitgeist and I just made flash cards for myself and it genuinely took off overnight. It was on Jezebel. The next day I was coming home from the farmer's market on the bus and my phone was kind of blowing up like, what's going on? Is somebody hurt, what's happening? And my friends go, You're on Jezebel.
Luke Burbank But I mean, would it be overstating to say that sort of changed the course of your life? I mean, otherwise you'd be a professor somewhere teaching, you know, maybe gender studies or something like that?
Danielle Henderson Well, that was part of the reason that I did. I jumped at the chance to turn it into a book which I wrote over my first winter break, because I knew I'd have a calling card if I did that, if it stayed on the Internet, it would just kind of disappear. But if I had a book, I could start to make some headway with it. And I did want to teach. I wanted to be an academic and I, I applied and got into quite a few doctoral programs and I chose one that wasn't really a good fit in a place that I didn't really love. So I left after the first semester, but I was able to continue to use that book to get freelance writing work. And that definitely changed my life because my television agents found me through my freelance writing work about television.
Luke Burbank Well, we are we're very happy that you ended up where you ended up, Danielle, because the writing is amazing. And this memoir, The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson, is a must read.
Danielle Henderson Thank you for the incredible questions and for guiding me in this wonderful interview. I really, really had fun.
Luke Burbank That was Danielle Henderson right here on Live Wire. That interview was recorded as part of the Portland Book Festival. Danielle's book, The Ugly Cry, is available now. And just an update on what she's been up to. The TV series, The Other Black Girl, which Danielle is the showrunner for, was recently picked up by Hulu. So make sure to keep an eye out for that. This is Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We've got to take a very quick break, but don't go anywhere because we will be right back. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. All right, before we get to our music for this week, a little preview of next week's show. We are going to be talking to writer and Washington Post reporter Casey Parks about her book Diary of a Misfit. Now, in it, she dives into the mystery of a stranger's past, and she ends up reckoning with her own sexuality, her Southern identity and her relationship with her mother, who is let me just tell you, a real character. It's an incredible book. And we had an amazing conversation with Casey. Very excited for you to hear that. Then we're going to hear some music from the incredible singer songwriter Thunderstorm Artis. And as always, we're going to be looking to get your answer to our listener question. Elena, what are we asking the listeners for next week's episode?
Elena Passarello We want to know what is a mystery that you're still trying to solve.
Luke Burbank I was very into the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. I really thought I was going to be solving more mysteries as an adult, to be honest with you.
Elena Passarello Yeah, me too.
Luke Burbank I have no clubhouse. There are no local mysteries that anyone's asked me to work on. So I guess we'll want to hear what the listeners are still working on themselves. If you have an answer to that question, send it on in via Twitter or Facebook. We are over at Live Wire Radio. All right. Our musical guest this hour is a Seattle rock band that has received acclaim for their power and presence, also for their larger than life guitar hooks. Their third full length album, Impossible Weight, is out now. Take a listen to this. It's Deep Sea Diver performing one of our live shows at Revolution Hall right here in Portland. Hello.
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Hello. Hello.
Luke Burbank Nice to see you all.
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Nice to see you again.
Luke Burbank Um, I read, Jessica, a magazine piece about you where they called you a quiet giant of indie music.
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Ooh.
Luke Burbank How's that?
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver It's one of the nicer things.
Luke Burbank Really?
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver I don't know. I don't know what the quiet part means.
Luke Burbank Yeah, that's what I was wondering about. Have you been just quietly, you know, a giant force in indie music?
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Not by choice, but.
Luke Burbank I mean, it is interesting, though, because, like looking at your bio and all of the things that you've been involved with, along with Deep Sea Diver and Beck and The Shins, and you've really kind of seen it all in the music industry, you feel like that's that experience has been good for you fronting this band and kind of knowing the industry?
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Absolutely. I think kind of playing with all of those people. Like by osmosis, I just kind of just like want to soak everything in and and implement certain things with songwriting and like how I perform and how I can push myself in the band. And so it's been so beneficial to play with other people.
Luke Burbank Yeah. What song are we going to hear?
Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver Impossible Weight, the title track.
Luke Burbank All right. Well, this is Deep Sea Diver here on Live Wire.
Deep Sea Diver This is what it feels like walking in a straight line, stray talk clicking in my ear. This is what it feels like cliff dive broken mind once wondering how I got here. A million times tongue tied, spit it out, never mind I think I'm addicted to the fear. Stutter in my heart from the hurry up stop dragging my heels around. Dragging my heels around. But that was then and this is now. I tried so hard not to let you all down. It's an impossible weight. So I'll just let you down now. Steady as the wheel turns, on my way it's okay. Picking up the pieces, put 'em down. Stutter in my heart, from the hurry up, stop dragging my heels around. Dragging my heels around. But that was then and this is now. I tried so hard not to let you all down. But that was then and this is now. I tried so hard not to let you all down. It's an impossible weight. So I'll just let you down now. It's an impossible weight. It's an impossible weight. But that was then and this is now. I tried so hard not to let you all down. It's an impossible weight. So I'll just let you down now. Thank you.
Luke Burbank That was Deep Sea Diver. Their latest album is Impossible Weight and is out and available now. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of the show. A huge thanks to our guests, Kaveh Ackbar, Danielle Henderson and Deep Sea Diver. Special thanks this week to Amanda Bolick and the Portland Book Festival. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michelle is our executive director. Our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our assistant editor is Tré Hester. Our marketing manager is Paige Thomas and our production fellow is Tanvi Kumar. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayel Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes music. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer and our house sound is by D. Neil Blake.
Luke Burbank Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the state of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Donald Mason of Vancouver, Washington and Toby Fitch of Portland, Oregon. Toby also happens to be a member of our board and an all around lovely human being. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, visit LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
