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Michele, what is something you hope will happen at the CityLit Festival this year? 

Michele Filgate: I’m really excited to connect with readers. That’s my main goal. The Festival is going to be extra special for my book tour, because it is the very first event I’m doing for the new book [What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence]. It doesn’t come out till May 6. I’m so excited to be in conversation with Susan Muaddi Darraj, one of the wonderful contributors to my book. It was such an honor to work with her on editing her essay.

In terms of literary real estate, writing about parenting, I think fatherhood is still very much marginalized. And a long time ago, I was telling a poet friend that in the way that women had to define and create a space for themselves in society with the women’s lib movement, men/fathers may need to do something similar in terms of becoming visible in discourses about parenting. 

MF: Absolutely, and this is part of the reason I wanted to do this book. There are some difficult and complicated fathers in this book. But there are also some loving fathers. You know, and there’s a wide range of fathers in this book. The point is that I’m trying to make is that there’s not just one type of father. I think that we kind of get fixated on the sitcom portrayal. And there’s a much richer tapestry out there to draw from. Alot of this is about getting rid of the ideas of toxic masculinity as well. I think that we’re changing the definitions, and the ideas of what fatherhood can be and can look like.

Can you tell me a little bit about what set this project in motion? Because I know that you did a previous anthology about mothers. And so I’m just curious to know, what happened in your personal life, in your creative life, where you said, okay, I need to collect these stories [personal essays] on fathers and add to the discourse? 

MF: Yeah, so the first book came out in 2019, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. And as I went on a book tour for that—the book went viral twice on TikTok—what I would hear again and again from readers was ‘where’s the book about fathers? I want a book about dads too. I have so much to say about what I don’t talk about with my dad.’ I think there’s also a stereotype there that some people can say more to their moms than they can to their fathers.

So, I wanted to explore that idea as well: Is there a difference there? And what does that look like? And I think this book does a really good job of showing that, just like there’s no one way of being a mom, there’s no one way of being a dad as well.

Can you speak more about the editing, the curation, overall what was your process? Did you have a list of writers who you knew were writing about this topic?  How did you go about selecting the writers for the anthology?

MF: So just like for the first book, it was very important to me to have a wide array of experiences in there. And stuff that didn’t overlap too much, although it’s always interesting the ways in which the essays can speak to each other, even if it wasn’t intentional.

For both [projects], there were authors that I knew I wanted to reach out to. I’ve been in the writing world for a long time, not just as a writer, but also I used to be on the board of the National Book Critics Circle for a while. I used to have a reading series in New York City dedicated to women writers called Red Ink, where I would curate different discussions, a quarterly series. And I used to run events at bookstores for many years. So that combination has led me to having a wide network to draw from.

But I also wanted to have a blend of established writers and emerging writers. And it was important to me to not just have New York City based writers, so geographically diverse, too. 

So what did you learn through this whole journey of editing not one, but two anthologies about parenting? 

MF: So much. But the main thing I’ve learned is that our relationship with our parents—no matter whether we’ve never met them, or if they are still alive or not, or if we are estranged from them, no matter what someone’s relationship with a parent is—it is always evolving, because we are always changing as human beings, we are living our lives, and our perspectives might change over time. So our relationships with our parents can change as well.  They’re not a fixed thing on a map; they are something that can evolve. 

Dominique, as a way to learn a little more about you, can you tell me about this office that you occupy as a US State Department envoy to Cyprus? 

Dominique Christina: Sure. I had a previous relationship with Cyprus. I was a classroom teacher for a number of years working with students that had been deemed at risk for Denver Public Schools. I had a coworker, Brady Rhodes, who would ask if he could watch me, observe me, teach my students, and he often did. He, at some point, said that he was going to be working with the State Department that summer on a program that brought high school students from the island of Cyprus to the states by communal programming.

And so, I worked with the Cyprus kids that summer and I loved them and they loved me, and I was asked to stay on board. So then, going forward, about a decade or so, more than that, a couple of years ago, I received an email from a person in the Bureau of Culture and Education State Department saying that I had been chosen as an arts envoy to Cyprus. I think that that choice was situated in a few things.

One, the post is about representing excellence and poetics where you go. I’m honored to do that. I also think it’s about Cyprus being a divided island. The north is Turkish-speaking Cypriots. The south part of the island is Greek-speaking Cypriots. It’s divided in the middle. The capital city itself is divided, like literally bifurcated, cut in half. Nicosia is the capital city. It is governed by UN guards and checkpoints.

Turkish-speaking Cypriots are Muslim, overwhelmingly Muslim, and Greek-speaking Cypriots are Orthodox Christian and Greek-speaking Cypriots enjoy more privilege than Turkish-speaking Cypriots do on the island. Most recently, there’s also been a heavy influx of other folks coming from elsewhere and none of them are in harmony in their lives. They’re in crisis.

Some of them are coming from countries in Africa because of what imperialism is doing in those places, and so they are coming to Cyprus seeking refuge. A lot of people are coming into Cyprus right now because of what’s happening in Palestine, which is not that far away from Cyprus. It’s an interesting reality that folks navigate on that island.

I’m good at speaking into stuckness. I’m good with that. I can help you get unstuck. And it’s a gift I’m grateful for. I think poetry is one of many tools I use to do that, but that was the appointment, and so I’m tasked with going to Cyprus and participating in bicommunal programming, bringing Turkish-speaking Cypriots together with Greek-speaking Cypriots and trying to dissolve that line between them. It’s an inheritance.

I wonder if you think artists should get training on how to use their gifts to facilitate harmony among humanity. I feel like that’s the thing they don’t talk to you about in graduate school.

DC: No, they don’t. But I don’t know if we’re all doing the same thing with our art. For those of us who are sort of participating in that experiment—I’m mostly trying to shift consciousness. If there’s an agenda, it’s that. I’m trying to shift consciousness. 

I’m not saying my consciousness is the right consciousness. I am saying there has not been a single room that I have walked into where folks were situated perfectly in harmony with the world, with themselves, with communities that differed from their own, ideologies that differed from their own, histories and cosmologies that differed from their own. I haven’t walked into a room yet where everybody’s okay with all that difference.

A lot of rooms say that they are. The most progressive rooms, you know what I mean? Push a button or two, ask a question or two, and find out where we’re stuck in our thinking.

We’ve inherited a lot. And again, I’m not alarmed by or interrupted by using my art or my personhood to detonate certain traditions or ask certain questions that might make us uncomfortable first, but we will eventually climb to the top of that interrogation and realize that how we’re performing right now is from an inheritance that we’ve already grown past. But nobody’s invited us into that discussion.

I’m good at inviting you into that discussion. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m encouraging you to think.

That’s it. And so I do agree with you that. I think artists should be taught that if you are in dis-ease, then art can be the medicine. If you are in discomfort about the state of the world, then art can be the call, the match, the line in the sand, you know, provocation, whatever. But it depends on what it is that you’re trying to do. And I’m trying to raise consciousness. I want folks to be liberated, and I want them to be introduced to their possibilities.

Where did you inherit that perspective, that mission for your art? Because like you said, not everyone’s doing the same thing with their art. And when I hear you, I’m thinking of poets like Sonia Sanchez. I’m thinking of some of our elders who really wanted to bring healing to the community through their art. I’m thinking of June Jordan. So many, you know. 

DC: It’s the context in which I was born. I had grandparents that were seismic and impossible. They were impossible as individuals, and they were impossible as the collective, that couple. They were epic, and incredible, and they had climbed through so many things, and they were willing to tell you about it, and give you the game they got from it, and insert wisdom, and guidance, and be a North Star for so many people. 

I watched my grandparents be radical in their generosity, and in their honesty, and in confronting history over, and over, and over again, and inviting other people to do the same thing, and making all of that feel like home, and being so proficient in kin making.

And so, I did have that. I do come from that. I do. I come from a mother who was generous with making sure I knew where our gifts were. I knew what Langston Hughes had done. I knew what Nikki Giovanni had done. I knew what Sonia Sanchez had done. I knew. But I also knew what Shakespeare, and Edgar Allen Poe, and them folks had done too. She did not make me feel like that language didn’t belong to me too. In fact, she made me know it did. All of it belonged to me.

What will you be sharing with us at the CityLit Festival? If you know.

DC: So I never know. 

I was picking up on that vibe. I said, if you know, because I was like, you probably will let the work decide what needs to come. Just sensing that from you.

DC: That’s what happens. I didn’t intend to be a poet at all. I certainly didn’t intend to be this kind of poet. Once I realized I was going to be a poet, I didn’t intend to say anything out loud ever, ever, ever. I was going to write it. I was going to keep it in the lockbox or something. And then my grandkids was going to find it when I was dead. And that’s how they learned that I was a poet.

That’s what I was going to do. 

You went to Emily Dickinson, huh? 

DC: Yeah, I did. I had the Emily Dickinson plan. I had it all mapped out. 

So it didn’t go like that. And I, and now I feel like what happens is—and I’m really grateful for it, although it creates some chagrin sometimes for others— I really never know what I’m going to read because the room does have to dictate it. I mean, my own beating heart is still the metronome, but I’m listening for something every time. 

I’m thinking about the TED Talk that you did that I was so blessed to watch. And I love what you said about language as culture keeper. I’m thinking about our current political moment where anything about liberation, anything about Black folks. . . they want to scrub it from American history. And I’m just wondering, how do you see the work that you do, the work that writers do, the work that storytellers do as especially necessary for this moment? 

DC: Repression, suppression, oppression has always only ever borne liberatory practices.

I don’t know why they ain’t put that together yet, but it’s just, it’s just the truth. The more you go like this, the more that thing wants to rise to the top. You give it something to resist. And so now resistance is the framework I’m operating from. Again, I don’t know why they haven’t put this together. You could just let Black people be in their nature, in their magic, in their gifts.

Let us be on the planet as ourselves uninterrupted, right? And things would hurt less on all sides. But something about us being in the world as ourselves is triggering for folks who don’t want to see that kind of vibrancy. And so as a consequence, you start seeing policies increasingly repressive, increasingly suppressive, increasingly oppressive.

And anytime you see a push for that, you just supposed to get louder, bigger, brighter, more strategic. Though don’t get loud just to get loud. Don’t go outside just to be seen. Be a wise strategist. Be a warrior about it. Be poised on a rooftop and have intelligence, superior intelligence about the landscape, the land, and the people who occupy it, what their needs actually are.

You have to have that. You have to have some level of discernment because the language that we are inheriting right now in terms of politicians and policy is steeped in fear and deficit and division. And this is where language, in my opinion, is most urgent. Your ability to hear it for what it is and what it is not is really important. And so as artists, if the thing you’re using is language, if that’s the thing you’re using, I would say the urgency is to confront and undermine the rhetoric with its opposite.

If the rhetoric is making you small, it’s supposed to situate you as this small and broken, afraid thing, this incapable thing, this uninitiated thing, then you respond by being initiated. You respond by being wise. You respond by being strategic.

Where they think you’re going to pop off, you respond by being calm. I see you coming. You don’t move me. I move me. Spirit moves me. You don’t move me. So it’s that. To me, we become the light bearers. We become North Stars for other people if language is what we’re using.

If language is what we’re using, then we need to be using language as a means to liberate others. To point them to where the agendas are that are trying to keep them small. That point them to where the agendas are that are trying to make them react rather than respond.

That’s the call. Language is a culture keeper because we think in pictures and language is what’s creating the picture. So I say a word and your brain is immediately traveling down a hallway looking for an image to attach to the word I just said. So if I’m languaging myself because I have inherited language, that language is me as small, as broken, as flawed, as history’s bad luck accident, and I don’t interrogate that, but I acquiesce to it, right? Then my reality looks like the affirmation of that language.

We can point people to their brilliance. We can point people to their magic. We can point people to their healing.

It’s amazing to be able to tell somebody who has lived their entire lives hearing that they are this broken thing, that they are the medicine. That they’re the thing we need. That there’s this thing on the planet that can only be done by them.

And art often does that. Art often introduces folks to their own gifts. You know? Black folks have certainly used that tradition to do so. We sing in the dark and we see what voices meet us there. What harmonies we can find. Work songs ain’t work songs because we passing the time. Work songs are work songs because we are communicating a need. Meet me there. Meet me there.

Allow me to remain human. I’m in my gift right now. In this field. Though dying or feeling like I’m dying. Though the sun is beating me up. Though my baby is, I don’t know where. I’m singing. My heart still gives me that. Meet me there. And our folks meet us there. To me, that’s the tradition of it. We’re still alive. And we announce it in amazing, astonishing ways. We’re still alive. We’re still alive.

Find more information about the CityLit Festival as well as a full schedule of events HERE.