Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 131

Amena Brown:

Hey y'all. Welcome back to a new episode of HER With Amena Brown, and this episode is an Ask Amena Anything. So I got these questions from social media, so here I am. I'm going to answer your questions.

Okay, first question is, "Favorite place to get jumpsuits?" I am a girl who loves jumpsuits. I did not know that I would love jumpsuits as much as I do. Shout out to Michelle Norris, who is a fantastic photographer and just guru of style generally. And at the time, Michelle Norris was doing some personal styling just on the side, and so she definitely is the person who got me into wearing jumpsuits. She was like, "You ought to try this on." And I have never gotten back to not being a person who wasn't wearing jumpsuits. Okay. Favorite places to buy jumpsuits. I have to give, I guess it's a local shout-out, but this boutique I'm about to name also has an online store. Pink Sky Boutique, I've gotten quite a few of my favorite jumpsuits from there.

Also, I have to give a shout-out to TJ Maxx, because not so much for fall per se, but in the spring and the summer I have found some of my favorite jumpsuits there. But here's the difference. Here's the thing. It depends on what kind of jumpsuit you're wanting, and I'm a girl who likes jumpsuits for any occasion, so I have some jumpsuits that are jumpsuits to wear just in the house. Then I have some jumpsuits that are just something to put on while you're running errands or whatever. And then I have jumpsuits that to me are like, "I'm going out" type of jumpsuit, and then I have more of a corporate or officey looking jumpsuit for certain events and stuff like that.

So TJ Maxx is really good for a very casual or sporty jumpsuit. And the trick that I've learned, though, is for some reason I don't find as many casual jumpsuits in the women's section, which is normally where my sizing would be. Sometimes in order to find a very cute or sporty casual jumpsuit, I have to go over to the junior's section and go to the end. The highest size of the junior section, that is where I have found a lot of great casual jumpsuits.

I love to pay attention to jumpsuits that athletic brands have, like the Jordan brand and the Adidas brand. You can sometimes find some really, really cool jumpsuits from there. So yes, those are probably my favorite places to get a jumpsuit, but pretty much any store that I go in, I'm going to look at the jumpsuit section, like anytime.

Somebody asked me what were my reflections coming from Evolving Faith, and for those of you that aren't familiar, Evolving Faith is a conference, but also an online community for people who may have grown up in Christian environments or may have been Christian certain time of life, and now may find their theology shifting or broadening. Evolving Faith is, in its conference state, a place where people can come and just hear from different speakers who are not conservative Christians and are not evangelical Christians, but are more progressive and liberal voices, and some voices that are existing in these different places and expressing sort of how their faith shows up in those environments.

So many of you know if you've been listening to this podcast a long time that for the most part, I no longer do a lot of the type of faith-based Christian events that I was doing for so long in my career. Evolving Faith is one of a very small, small number of events that are related to faith that I still do, related to Christian faith. And I think what I love about Evolving Faith also though is that it's just such an inclusive place. It's inclusive for anyone, whatever your gender, whatever your sexual orientation, wherever you are theologically or spiritually. You could be atheist and attend Evolving Faith. You could be agnostic.

I love that it is a place that welcomes queer folks, that is having a lot of conversation around what it means to be LGBTQ+ and be Christian or be LGBTQ+ and having grown up in environments that were very hostile to you because of Christian religion. So there's a lot of just welcome and inclusivity that I really love about that. So I have been the emcee for Evolving Faith for the past four years, and as of this recording, I was just there in the last week or two emcee-ing. And what are my reflections?

Man, I think one of the things that has meant a lot to me about being a part of Evolving Faith is really, being an emcee, I also get to be in the audience too. So I'm introducing speakers, but I actually get to sit down and listen to some of them. And I, especially this year, had the opportunity since we were back in person to really have an opportunity to sit and listen to two or three of the sessions in full. And as a person whose theology has shifted quite a bit from maybe the Christian theology I was raised with, or even where my theology was when I first started performing in white Christian conservative evangelical environments, it's nice to feel like you are with other people who are also on a searching journey. It definitely made me feel less alone and made me feel more aligned.

And there was a lot of similar messaging to say that when you realize that the way that you believe may be changing, that that can feel like... A lot of the language around Evolving Faith is that that can be this wilderness. But there was a lot of affirmation during the event to say that the wilderness is not a bad place to be. I even remember Dante Stewart, who was one of the speakers there, he was talking about how lost is also a place, and can be a good place. It doesn't have to be viewed as this bad place.

So yeah, I really enjoyed getting to be a part of that and getting to be a part of the community. And there are a lot of people who are speakers and things at Evolving Faith that are my friends, and so it's always nice to see them, but it's also nice just to be in the crowd there. And I think when other people see me there that may know me from having been in a conservative church space, I think when they see me there I can see their eyes light up like, "Oh my gosh, you're here?" And I'm sure the last place they may have seen me was in a more conservative church on a Sunday or at a more conservative conference or something.

And I think it does my heart good to be there, and I find that it does other people's hearts good to see that I'm there and that I want to be a part of a Christian faith that is inclusive, that isn't excluding folks that are disabled, that isn't excluding folks who are queer or trans. Isn't excluding anyone that wants to do the work of anti-racism. That's the faith that I want to be a part of. So I think the plus to Evolving Faith is you get to be around people who are not just against things that you're against, but are also for things you're for, and are for people that you're for. So there's that.

I guess this segues into my next question, "Why do you believe in God?" That's a really interesting question, and I would say in this season of my life is really, really layered. I will say I'm not a person who processes well publicly. I can be an external processor in the sense that when people are close to me, I like to talk things out and I like to say my thoughts out loud and hear the people I love sort of bounce their thoughts back off of me. I like that kind of thing, but I'm not a person who can be processing sort of the deeper things of my life and blog about it or write about it on social media.

So there are a lot of things that I believe, a lot of things I no longer believe, a lot of things that I've been in process about that I haven't spoken about publicly. And some of that, on my part, has been really intentional, because I don't want the rush to be for me to make statements if where I'm at is not a place that's ready to make statements. And some of that has just been me wanting to give myself the proper time in real life to think about things.

So why do I believe in God? I will say, I guess I'll start with, even though there are a lot of places my theology has shifted, I do still believe in God and I do still believe in Jesus, and I believe in the message of Jesus in building a table that welcomes everyone, and in building a table that has people there that other people may say shouldn't be at the table. I love that part about Jesus. And I think sometimes I would say that I believe in God because my ancestors did, because I can look back on generations of my family and all of the things that my people have walked through and that they managed to still find a way to look towards God.

I think that the idea that there is a God who loves and who understands and who feels our suffering and our pain, who is not separated from that. All of those things really jive with me. So I don't know. It's hard to answer why, because I can't say it's like "I have this scientific proof that God exists." I guess I'll say I believe in God because I feel like that's a risk I'm willing to take.

There's a whole lot about life and God, to me, that is a mystery that we can go to theology school for the rest of our lives and there'll be a lot about the mystery of God that we'll never understand. There'll be a lot about the mystery of life that we'll never understand, but I believe in God because I'm willing to take a risk on believing. And I may discover at the end of life that there isn't an afterlife and that we just close our eyes and that's it. But I'm willing to take that risk and believe that there is a God that loves us and there is a God that wants to be present to us. So yeah, that's as far as I can get right now.

Next question says, "What is one thing you wish you could change with a snap to make the world better?" Of course, my first thoughts about this question are just very ignorant, but my first thought was like, "I just want us to be able to eat as many carbs as we want and it not do anything to our bodies that has any damage at all." That was the first thing. I feel like I should have a deeper answer for that. I will say, the concept of having something that you could change about the world in a snap is probably not something that I would ask for or really identify with. I think life as a human and life on this earth as we know it is full of a lot of beautiful things, and it's also full of a lot of really horrible things too, and heartbreaking things.

And I don't know what the butterfly effect is of you snap your fingers and you change this thing, then how does that affect all the other things? But if I was going to say a more serious one, my one thing would probably be white supremacy. That would be the one thing I would want to change, because I think inside, I feel like in white supremacy is purity culture, is homophobia, is transphobia, is so many things like that, is ableism. All of that stems from the roots of white supremacy to me. So that would probably be my one serious thing outside of being able to eat as many donuts as I wanted without having to worry about my blood sugar.

Okay, somebody said, I want to hear more spoken word. Well, I have a poem here that I'm going to share. It's technically not spoken word, but since it's poetry, I'm going to share it anyways. I actually saw this as a comment on IG and was like, "I too want to hear more spoken word." So I'll read you this poem.

This poem is a contrapuntal poem, and shout out to the homie Tawny Powell who was doing a writing workshop a few years ago here in Atlanta. And if you're not familiar with the form of contrapuntal, it's basically like you have a poem that, I don't remember exactly how many lines it is, but the lines, you sort of take two opposing ideas and you write one poem about the one idea and then you write another stanza about the other opposing idea. And then you link these two stanzas together line for line. So normally a contrapuntal poem would be best experienced on a page where you could actually see it, but we will try it here where you can hear it.

So I really didn't have a title for this poem, but the theme we were writing from was actually around the same time of year that this episode is being released. So we were writing this poem during the fall. It was leading into Thanksgiving holiday time. And so the concept that we were supposed to explore was in the one stanza, explore the idea of feast, and in the other stanza explore the idea of famine, and then you take the lines and sort of intertwine them. So you read the one stanza, you read the second stanza, and then your third stanza is the two stanzas combined line for line.

We come to the table full of Dad's smoked turkey and Mom's cornbread dressing, yams, and greens. Say grace, say what you are thankful for, and when it is your turn, say a scripture and pray no one has already said "Jesus wept." Little kids eat first. Who will fix grandma's plate? Did you fix your man's plate? Did she fix your man's plate? Eat, drink, be merry, be full. Watch football. Fix a to-go plate to remember them by.

Can skeleton-thin relationships still hold hands? Love can still be very hungry at a family dinner where the table is full. Deserts don't have nothing on the parched way we communicate. We have left each other wanting with the gnawing sound of malnourished marriages. When a mentality of poverty teaches you to parent, you raise your babies to believe they should only accept the scraps they are given. They should only want leftovers somebody else has already chewed through. Besides, filling your belly will only leave you empty anyway.

Welcome to the table. Can skeleton-thin relationships still hold hands full of Dad's smoked turkey? Love can still be very hungry, and Mom's cornbread dressing, yams, and greens at a family dinner, say grace, say what you are thankful for. Where the table is full and when it is your turn, deserts don't have nothing on the parched way we communicate. Say a scripture we have left each other wanting, and pray no one has already said "Jesus wept." With the gnawing sound of malnourished marriages, little kids eat first. When a mentality of poverty teaches you to parent, who will fix grandma's plate?

You raise your babies. Did you fix your man's plate to believe they should only accept the scraps they are given? Did she fix your man's plate? They should only want the leftovers. Eat, drink, be merry, be full. Watch football somebody else has already chewed through. Fix a to-go plate to remember them by. Besides, filling your belly will only leave you empty anyway.

Okay, question six. "What is your creative process like these days? What genres or art forms are you prioritizing?" I'm going to be honest and say that the last two years have been really difficult for me, and there was a long period of time where I wasn't writing at all. So a part of my writing process and creative process has been returning to writing. I don't know if any of you have ever been through something so hard that even doing the creative thing that you loved is painful to return to. That's kind of what my writing process has been like. I feel like I had to slowly find my way back to the page.

And I'll say, a larger part of my process that's been really helpful is reading. I feel like I've always been a reader, and I know if you're a writer listening, you always hear the advice about reading and then you're like, "Yikes, I'm so tired of hearing it." But I know that it's true. I know that when you read well that you write better. I know that's true, even if you read a book that's not great, that will still help you be a better writer. But when it literally comes to the time that I actually physically sit down to write, I don't normally read during those times, and my initial return to try and write again, I picked two or three books.

Right now I'm reading Black Women Writers at Work. I'm reading through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and I'm reading through Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance. And I'm also reading through R. Eric Thomas's Here For It, as well as DaMaris Hill's, I think it's, I'm going to get the name of her book wrong, so I'll look it up to try to make sure I get it right for y'all. But I'm reading one of DaMaris Hill's poetry books, which has been really, really good.

So pretty much when I started wanting, actually having the feeling where I wanted to write... Oh, here it is. The book of hers that I'm reading is called A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing. That's the poetry book by DaMaris Hill that I'm reading. And I want to give a shout-out to The Watering Hole, which is a poetry retreat that I went on last year, and I went there last year almost feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to this poetry retreat and I'm struggling to even write." But I think being in an environment where you're just sort of writing on the spot for a week really helped me get back in the groove.

At first I couldn't write, I would just read, and then I would have to go do something else. And then I got to where I could read for a certain amount of time and then I could write for 10 minutes. And then I worked my way up to where I could write sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes an hour. I don't think I've written longer than an hour at a time still. So I think that's a little bit of an example of where my writing process is. There used to be a lot of music and jazz and stuff, and there's really been a lot more reading other work and then taking time to read poems I'm still working on out loud.

I am working on a few other things that are not poetry. So some of that is trying to watch other genres of things, like I'm working on a project with some other creative folks that's a musical. So having to study a bit more the form of the musical and know a little bit more about that. The other part of the question is, "What genres or art forms are you prioritizing?" Oh, one other thing I'll say about my creative process, though, is I'm also doing a bit of events, because I am the chapter host for Creative Mornings Atlanta. So I think collaboration, I would say, is a much bigger part of my creative process than it used to be. I used to be very much a lone creator, like, I'm writing a poem, I'm writing a poem in my office by myself. If I'm working on it for a client or something, maybe I send it over to them, maybe they give their feedback, but it's not really like we're collaborating on the project.

And so I think in this season of time, I have opened myself up to be in more collaborative environments, which I think is really, really helpful because first of all, then it's not all on you to make the writing or whatever. I mean, typically what I'm doing mostly is writing, but even in the case of working on events and curating environments and things like that, it's not all on me. I actually have other folks whose expertise and talents and gifts that I can lean on as well. So I think collaboration is a much bigger part of my creative process now. And what genres or art forms am I prioritizing? I think I'm still prioritizing poetry in two ways, in writing poetry and in getting ready for stage as well.

I am prioritizing storytelling. In some ways it's dishonest for me to say that I accidentally became a storyteller, because that really isn't true. I came from a family of storytellers who may not tell stories professionally, but I come from a family of people who are going to sit down and tell you a story. That's just the truth. But as far as telling stories on stage, that happened to me accidentally for a long time, especially because I was performing sort of God word poetry that would be done in sort of a church environment. So I wasn't doing sets of poems. I would walk up, I would do my poem, they would go back to doing music. So it took me some years to learn how to build a poetry set and how would I get from one poem to the next poem. So that's really what made me, I feel, become an accidental stage storyteller.

I've been participating in The Moth in Atlanta, which has been a really great sharpening ground on how to tell a story on a theme, how to mine the stories in your life and think about that. So I feel like that's definitely a genre or art form that I'm working in right now. And the form of the essay. I really love essays. My last book, How to Fix a Broken Record, was mostly short, kind of punchy essays. And when I was working on that book, I really felt like I was beginning to find my voice and beginning to find the form of poetry that I like. So I am very, very beginnings of working on my next book Idea.

This will be potentially the first book that I will be putting out there that will not be under Christian publishing, which is wild to think, but also really fun. Really fun to think about that. So I've just been sort of writing some beginning essays for that. And really, essays is really same storytelling muscle, but now how you represent that story in a way that someone could read it and get a similar vibe from it as if they were hearing me or watching me on stage. So yeah, those are my answers there.

Most memorable meal at a restaurant. I have to say the meal that I had for my birthday at Gunshow, which is Kevin Gillespie's restaurant here in Atlanta, and if you're a Top Chef fan, Kevin Gillespie was definitely a cast member of Top Chef and one of the few southern chefs that was there. So I really enjoyed getting to have a meal there at his restaurant Gunshow, because I'd wanted to go there for a long time. So Matt took me there for my birthday, which was great.

And my other favorite meal that I've had, but I have to make sure I get it right, it was a collective of chefs here in Atlanta, and maybe they weren't all from Atlanta. I don't think they were all from Atlanta, if I think about it right. But it was a Sunday supper, and it was all Black chefs, and it was inspired by Chef Edna Lewis, who, if y'all have been listening to this podcast or watching other things that I've written, you know that I love Edna Lewis very much and just think that she's so amazing.

Oh, I got it now. Okay, so there's a collective of chefs here in Atlanta called Stolen Goods. And so Stolen Goods as a collective did a Sunday supper meal that was a tribute to Edna Lewis. So some of the dishes were kind of inspired by these things that Edna Lewis put in her various books. And if you're not familiar with Chef Edna Lewis, she was what many people consider to be one of the foremothers of southern cuisine and soul food cuisine as well.

It was just gorgeous food. I mean, field peas and fried chicken. And the one thing that's very central to Chef Edna Lewis's work is that she really believed in farm-to-table before it was even referred to as farm-to-table. She believed in cooking with seasonal foods and figuring out ways you can sort of be more mindful of that. And so that Sunday supper meal was probably one of my last and best, most memorable meals.

And last question. Oh, what is my ideal sandwich? And let me tell y'all something. I'm sure that I've mentioned this here on the podcast, but I am a big fan of sandwiches. If somebody were to be like, "You have an opportunity to have a last meal, what would your last meal be?" For me, it would probably be a sandwich. Probably be a sandwich, the closest to a hoagie that I could get. So my ideal sandwich is definitely that hoagie style, amazing, kind of soft bread.

I like sliced swine on my sandwich. Love a good prosciutto, salami, whatever kind of sliced Italian deli meats that can be there. Really want to participate in that. Love a crisp iceberg lettuce. I feel like you really cannot play games with romaine or any of those other things, arugula. You really don't want to be playing those games on my sandwich. Love a tomato, big shout-out if it's summertime and you're actually getting tomatoes in season or you're getting heirloom tomatoes, love that in a sandwich. Sometimes I really get involved in a good banana pepper on there that can give you that kind of crisp, but a little bit of spice. Sometimes.I just love a good pickle also, but I feel like I'm generally whatever would fall in the category of an Italian grinder sandwich. It's really where it is for me.

I really feel like... Can I tell y'all something funny? I really feel like if I could be myself, but in another metaverse where I had a different job and I was just doing different things, I still think in that other metaverse, I would still be a writer, but maybe it wouldn't show up as poetry. Maybe I would be a sandwich blogger, and I would just blog about all these different sandwiches that I got to eat. That's a side dream life for me, that I just go around the country eating sandwiches and reviewing them and getting to taste all the best sandwiches in America, and then eventually in the world, just being generally a sandwich world traveler. That's still a dream of mine.

Anyways, thank you y'all for asking such great questions and I will see y'all back here on the podcast next week.

HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.