Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 66

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We took a bit of a hiatus, but thank you for your patience. We are back this week. Check out this episode from the HER archives from the before times where I talk with musician, filmmaker and emerging theologian, SueAnn Shiah. SueAnn shares the journey of making her documentary HuanDao about her return to her parents' home country, Taiwan for a biking pilgrimage. Listen in as we discuss the power of indigenous music and how returning to a familial home can help us define what's been lost. Check it out.

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. In my feelings, I think that if you have been listening to this podcast, you know that I have a habit of that. But in particular, I have reasons to be deeply in my feelings today because as our guest is Taiwanese American musician, filmmaker, emerging theologian specializing in identity formation, racial justice, gender and sexuality. Her first feature linked documentary HuanDao, which I just watched. I've feelings. Also, her debut solo album of reclaimed named A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints just released June of 2018. Welcome SueAnn Shiah to the podcast.

SueAnn Shiah:

Thank you so much for having me Amena.

Amena Brown:

Oh my gosh. SueAnn. Y'all for real, we had scheduled the time we were supposed to do this and I was late because I'm watching this documentary. I was watching it like, then what happened? Where did they bike to next? Oh my gosh. I just feel the feeling. So we are going to talk about the documentary, but I have to talk about how you and I met SueAnn. We actually met at a women's retreat and-

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah, we did.

Amena Brown:

... I don't remember if we were just sitting next to each other or what made us start chit chatting.

SueAnn Shiah:

Oh, I went up and talked to you.

Amena Brown:

Oh, right. Okay.

SueAnn Shiah:

Because you performed and then I was like, I got to talk to her. Also, I think I posted about you and our mutual friend, Emily Joy was like, "Amena's so awesome. She's amazing." And I was like, "I should go talk to her."

Amena Brown:

Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. So you're giving me the backstory right there, because my remembrance of it is you walking up and somehow we started talking about what you do when you were talking about your work and music production and sound.

SueAnn Shiah:

I remember that conversation very thoroughly myself.

Amena Brown:

I mean, I love that stuff anyway, but I love hearing a woman talk about it and hearing a woman that works in that field and industry, because I know only a few women who do, and so I was just immediately like, "This woman's brilliant." Yes. I'm here for everything.

SueAnn Shiah:

Did you know the statistic is actually 95% of audio engineers and producers are men?

Amena Brown:

Wow.

SueAnn Shiah:

95%.

Amena Brown:

No.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah. It's pretty bad.

Amena Brown:

Oh my gosh. That's why every time I hear a woman talking about it... I have a sister who... We didn't grow up in the same house, but she grew up in California and she is also into song production and composition and audio production as well. Whenever I meet another woman doing that, I'm just like, "Yes, girl. Yes. We need you really." But now I know about the statistics, I'm like, "No, really?" Like we real.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah. There's the Women's Audio Mission, which is an organization out of San Francisco. They do a lot of stuff to promote women and audio and stuff. So they've got the statistics. They've got the receipts.

Amena Brown:

Oh my gosh. So I basically have been very excited about knowing you since then, Sue Ann. Every now and then we run into each other at an event, but I started following you after that day. And have just been like, oh my, my gosh, she's brilliant all the time. Oh my gosh. So I need to talk about this documentary just because I have a lot of feelings.

SueAnn Shiah:

Go in.

Amena Brown:

I have feelings about it, so we need to discuss it.

SueAnn Shiah:

Let's have a little live therapy. Let's go in.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Let's just get in there because I was just like, I just feel like I'm brimming over with emotion. And I'm curious to know if you were feeling those emotions in the moments of experiencing what was filmed and then feeling those emotions after having to go through the editing process and seeing how the documentary formed itself. But for people who are just showing up to the scene here that are like, what's this documentary I need to watch? Link will be in this show notes. Please tell the people, describe to the people this documentary, the journey. Just give me a little background information.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah. So the documentary follows my two week bike trip around the... I guess it's called a circumnavigation, by the perimeter of the island of Taiwan. And so it's about around 500 miles of biking. We took a train at certain points that were a little bit more dangerous, but we talked to locals, we eat food, we see the sites and it's a travel film, but there's also interwoven in all of these do deeper themes about bicultural identity and belonging and home. Like liminal experiences, especially as an Asian American. So that's my little synopsis.

Amena Brown:

Okay. I like to ask every guest an origin story question. And one of the things that I have loved about just following you and also that I see in this documentary is your ability to tell a story. I think it takes being a good storyteller to not only make a great film, but also to make great music. Whether the music has-

SueAnn Shiah:

And I would argue to be a theologian.

Amena Brown:

... Same. Same.

SueAnn Shiah:

It's the same thing.

Amena Brown:

You need the skill right there. The skill, the want to tell a good story, to tell the important story. So did you grow up being a person that was interested in storytelling? Did you grow up in a family or in your community where you were hearing storytelling all the time? Do you feel like when you were younger, that there was this interest in you about wanting to tell or share a good story?

SueAnn Shiah:

I think so. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad putting me to bed at night and just telling me stories, not reading from a book. So my dad was born in Burma. He's Chinese. His parents escaped China when the communists took over after World War II. I used to always get him to tell me, we call them Jade stories because there's a lot of Jade in Burma for people who don't know. It's almost like strike it rich gold. You're just like in a field digging and then you find a giant Jade and strike it rich. It's your little rags to richest stories. So I used to always let my dad tell me Jade stories from Burma or China, I guess. And then we just were voracious readers, like books everywhere constantly.

SueAnn Shiah:

As soon as I could start reading chapter books on my own, my face was always buried in a book. There were a couple years where I literally carried at least a book or two around with me everywhere. I would like read while I brushed my teeth. I would read at the dinner table to the chagrin with my parents. I've just always loved a story. I didn't grow up in a Christian home and sometimes I reflect back on the time my growing up time before I became a Christian at 13. I think that my love of stories really just laid spiritual groundwork for me to become a Christian in a lot of ways, because, there was always a sense that there was a writer.

SueAnn Shiah:

There's someone who's telling the story and there's good and there's evil and there's destiny. And there's like this arc. There's just this sense that you're living in a story yourself. I wanted he one of the good guys, right? So of course that naturally gravitated towards God. And even though my parents aren't Christians, my mom raised us were the really in strong sense of moral, right and wrong. I think that combined with this being inclined, being someone drawn to art, whether that's music or film or literature or poetry. Those are the things that have always just captured my attention.

SueAnn Shiah:

My development as a young artist happened at the same time that I was becoming a Christian. I think I see those things as intertwined inseparable in a lot of ways. When I got to college, I made friends with this writer, poet, musician, her name's, Katie Bowser. She's part of our local like music hymns, Belmont RUF world and she introduced the phrase to me, meta narrative. I started to use to talk about the Bible, the meta narrative of the Bible. So in terms of the film itself, like it was really hard to tell a cohesive story arc. Because you have all these days, like all these individual days set up and you have to tell these mini stories while then also telling a larger story for the whole film.

SueAnn Shiah:

And the balance between that was really difficult because there were so many interesting little story arcs that happened throughout the days, but I had to edit to figure out what was going to make it, so it was ultimately cohesive as a whole film and not just 14 episodes of different days. So that is like the interaction of the concept of the meta narrative, which is what the Bible is too. Is a bunch of smaller stories that then tell a bigger story and how do you sift through that and how do you find the themes that link all of these little things together?

Amena Brown:

I'm just still in my feelings about it, because I think I'm really glad you introduced me now to the phrase meta narrative, because I think watching your documentary, I just felt like I was welling up with all these feelings. I think I really identified with this theme of home and how we define home. And home is with our people. It is in our ethnicity, it's in our homeland, even when we were not born in what would've been the Homeland of our people. And all of that journey of return, and there's one scene that I was like, if I don't stop watching this, I'm going to be ugly crying. And that's not great for a podcast recording because I don't know that anyone enjoys listening to someone ugly cry. But there was a scene where you were on the bike ride with your friend, Rachel. I didn't make that up, right?

SueAnn Shiah:

That's her name. Yes, you're right.

Amena Brown:

So you and Rachel are riding by and there's a family out in front of their home and they invite you to eat with them.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah, man.

Amena Brown:

And you stop and eat with them and they're sharing with you what it's like for them being Aboriginal people in Taiwan. You're telling them your journey in America. You're telling them the background of your parents and just the interplay of that conversation and them welcoming you home, them saying to you are always home here. You are home here anytime with us. And I just could have cried my eyes out. I mean, I'm watching it, on a screen here having a very emotional experience. What was that like for you just deciding, "Hey, we're going to make this stop right here." Which to me is not a super American thing to do, because you'd be like, "We don't know these people." We don't know what they're doing.

Amena Brown:

Whatever but I noticed more when I'm traveling outside of America that I am more inclined to do things like that just to be like, oh, they've invited us here. Let's pull these bikes over. Just go over here and eat a meal and hang out for a while. What was that experience like living it? And then what was it like when you went back to what you were referring to the editing process there that you knew that was a moment that needed to make the film?

SueAnn Shiah:

That day and that that scene is literally one of my favorites in the entire documentary. It was one of those things that you can hope will happen, but you can't plan will happen. I spend probably three, maybe four hours hanging out with them. So you're seeing a 10 minute edited down of like... There were so many conversations we had and so many other things we talked about and they were all such a gift. I really had to like parrot down for the film because literally just I could probably just edit those conversations with them and put that out as an entire interview series. But it was interesting. It was such a tense day because every day on the road you just didn't know what was going to happen. There's so much uncertainty and tension.

SueAnn Shiah:

So it's interesting because I had wanted to bike to that the Taitung village, because I wanted to make sure that the narratives of Aboriginal Taiwanese people were included in our documentary because a lot of Taiwanese Chinese people, people of Han like Chinese descent, they don't usually talk about that when they talk about what it means to be Taiwanese. I think it's similar to the way when white Americans talk about what it means to be American, they don't really talk about indigenous native people. I didn't want to like perpetuate this false narrative that we as Chinese people have a claim to this land when there were indigenous people there before.

SueAnn Shiah:

So my director of photography, she and I were making the schedule and she was like, what are you going to do? You're just going to show up and talk to random people. She just felt very skeptical of the way I wanted to structure our shooting and our time. And she grew up in New York born and raised. So even more, I think she is a really cynical view of the world of people. And I was like, yeah, because that's what you do. Like you just talk to random strangers and you make friends. Don't you do that? And she looked at me like I was crazy, but I think even living in... I've lived in Nashville for the last eight years and it really is just like that in Nashville too. You just start conversations with the randomest people and get to know each other.

SueAnn Shiah:

I'm glad that's where I grew up and as an adult becoming into my own because I think it gave me an outlook on how people do want to share their stories if you give them the chance. But yeah, mostly when I think back to that time, I just think of how fun it was. We just sat around and talked. I was starving. We had biked, probably like 35 miles that day. But like I feel the hunger because I was just so excited that we were getting to have this moment. This very organic and raw and honest moment with one another.

SueAnn Shiah:

The conversation was flowing so easily. I think in my life there's times when... I don't know if you have this where you feel like you are almost outside of your body and you're looking at the scene that you're living in. It's almost like the meta narrative concept of you're so aware of the story that you're living in. I like to call it the television show of your life. But as I've gotten older, I had that really increased awareness, especially when I was younger, when I first started writing and whether it's poetry or music or stories, but as I've gotten older, I've realized how important it is to be present and to put yourself back into the body and to actually experience it instead of always having the third person camera view of your life.

SueAnn Shiah:

So when I think of that moment, or those hours I spent, they didn't feel like hours. We just talked and then the time went way, and of course my director of photography and my parents were both like, where are you? You're not answering your phone. I totally shut like my phone off when we were recording that conversation. Because I wasn't answering any of the text, Rachel was like, "Your mom just called you wants to know where you are because you're not answering your phone."

SueAnn Shiah:

So I think I just felt so present. Like, so in my body so alive, just with the people. And I don't know... I haven't really found the words to explain what that's like, but when you forget everything else in the world melts away and you're just in a moment completely. That's how it felt is so fully alive, so fully present, so fully human.

Amena Brown:

It really comes across SueAnn. It really comes across. You can feel the soul of this film watching it. And that is just a huge kudos to you and your team because you can watch many things about people traveling, this, that the third place, but to be able to capture on film, not only traveling to a place, but the different nuances of what that means. I mean, it's so beautiful. I was watching for a while and then realized like, oh, there's one scene where you and Rachel and your dad are sitting eating food together in Taiwan and then I realized, oh, her parents are with her. I mean, wow. If it was just you and Rachel biking, that's still a great story.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah. They took the train.

Amena Brown:

But your parents even being present there while you and Rachel are doing the biking. When you were coming up with the idea that you knew, like, "Okay, I'm taking this trip." Did you go to your parents and say to them, "This is what I'm doing." And they were wanting to go, or how did it come about that they also...

SueAnn Shiah:

Decided to tag along on my great adventure?

Amena Brown:

Yes.

SueAnn Shiah:

So totally my plan was never to have them there. I was just going to do it also, because I didn't expect my parents to train on a bike for four months and then go, do all of that. But they were so intrigued by the idea and they were like, "That sounds really fun. We want to come do stuff." So, they didn't do the biking, they took the train and they would meet us at certain locations where we would ended up sleeping that night usually. They also didn't come for the whole thing. They did go back to Taipei from a lot of stretches of it. Especially you can see like, oh you haven't seen because you haven't gotten to the end, especially for the latter end of the documentary they're not there.

SueAnn Shiah:

So it really was just like, I gave them a schedule and they were like, well we want to do this stuff and this stuff and we can take the train. So we'll just meet you there. We'll do this with you here or there. They were really supportive of the film. I think, I tell people sometimes my life in Nashville, my music industry life, my Belmont world, my Nashville existence it doesn't really make sense to my immigrant parents. They don't really understand what I do, the industry, the art, the world that I live in.

SueAnn Shiah:

But this is the first time I created a piece of art that made sense to them. That they could understand and they were extremely supportive throughout the whole process, especially in helping reach out to their own network of Taiwanese community to get the money raised on Kickstarter. And that's something for me too, is thinking about what is Asian American art going to be? We're still building this cannon because there isn't a lot of work and what are the themes that we should and need to address. And some of it is a tension between a first and second generation.

SueAnn Shiah:

I intuitively sense that a lot of my parents generation, they so deeply want to be understood by their children, but because of this immigration process, because of raising us in America and wanting to give us different economic and social opportunities, they haven't really thought about the cost of what they lost in that immigration process of a generational gap between us and them. So much of the healing process for myself and doing my racial awareness identity stuff has been trying to heal some of those chasms with my parents.

SueAnn Shiah:

It's very difficult. It's like, I'm not going to pretend that like it's like I have a flawless relationship with my parents. I certainly don't. But when I talk to my other Asian American friends about the things I talk to my parents about, they're like what? Like you can talk to your parents about politics and about philosophy and about identity and sociology. And they're also like, "Wait, you have all those conversations in Chinese?" Because most of us don't have great language skills because English is our primary language. But yeah, I think there's a lot of healing to be done generationally and so be the change what you want to see in the world.

SueAnn Shiah:

I just knew that for me, it meant investing in language skills and investing in understanding our heritage and culture because as long as my parents have lived in America, their hearts are Chinese and they're never going to be able to understand American culture the way that I do. But I do have the tools to learn Chinese and Taiwanese culture. It's about putting in the work to learn how to use those tools.

Amena Brown:

I love hearing, just thinking about almost like the conversation between generations there, but those of us who are in the generation of children, that it also requires something of us. Requires a commitment of us to want to be able to speak back to our parents, to be in conversation with a generation that's very different from ours and has some different narratives too, and had different nuances and layers of that experience. I think I also felt a very visceral response to watching just the beginnings of this story unfold.

Amena Brown:

I didn't want to be super late for our podcast interview y'all. That's why I was like, "Oh, Amena, come on now." I would've been like four hours later I'm like SueAnn ugly cries through the entire episode, but just the parts with your parents and your dad talking through some of that history with you. There was a scene where you are sitting on a couch with your mom and you're hearing her talk to you about just what her upbringing was like and some of what it was like for her to be back there now. I think I had a really visceral response to that because I've been digging around into my family tree in the last couple of years.

Amena Brown:

And on my mom's side up to four generations of my family all have lived in North Carolina, including our ancestors who were enslaved. And really within a very small mile radius from my grandmother's hometown. I had the opportunity to return to that town with my grandmother and go back to some of the buildings that she remembered. And there's just some very visceral response I had to being in this place that even though I didn't grow up there, it is home, it is roots for me. there was this one moment that I think was why I was like, "About to ugly cry watching this film." Because my great-grandfather on my dad's side, he was a Bishop in their church denomination, but he also had a business where he made pulpits. He made sure furniture him and his sons.

Amena Brown:

I was going around trying to find this church where he'd pastored and the church had gone to a different church community. So it was no longer the church that my great-grandfather had pastored, but the building itself was still there. And we go in, of course, this is the summer shortly after the Charleston nine were murdered. So even walking into that church building and trying to explain to them why we wanted to go into the sanctuary and my husband being a white man and all of us feeling their moment of caution in that moment of, is this going to be okay? Do we let you in? I told them the names of my grandparents, all these things.

Amena Brown:

They let us into the sanctuary SueAnn and the original furniture was still there. This hand carved, hand etched furniture that this man that I met when I was a very young child, but don't have a lot of memories of him that this is furniture he made with his hands. So in this way to be present in his space, as an adult. I think there was something so reflective of that for me in this journey where you are there in this place, that your parents know or that some things that they knew, but also they are removed it in these certain ways from having gone to America. I mean, there were just so many nuances to the story that had tensions and beauty and so much combined together.

Amena Brown:

One of the reasons why I wanted to interview is because this season on the podcast is lost and found. I chose that because it's reflective of my life right now just like the feelings of there being some things that I have lost. Even in the losses, I have found maybe some parts of myself or some parts of my identity that the losing and the finding go together in these interesting ways. I liked that in your story, in the art that you make, there is always this theme of identity and home and where we find that and how we discover or that. How do the words identity and home, those themes, how do they play out in the art that you make? Is that a true statement for you? Would you say that those themes tend to come up in the art that you make?

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah. I definitely, I think they do. I think they come up again and again and maybe this is because of my own background and experience, but I see them consistently and constantly in my faith. When I look at the Bible, when I think about what it means to me to be a Christian, what the good news is, what is the gospel? I think it resonated with me because I always had a sense that I didn't know where I belonged and I didn't know where my home was. As a Asian American it's like, even though I was born here in the United States, my passport says, American citizen, socially and even in certain ways, systematically, I'm constantly being told that I don't belong here. And that was something I internalized as a kid.

SueAnn Shiah:

And you go back to wherever your parents immigrated from, and then they tell you, no you're not Taiwanese. You're American. Then you come to America and they say, you are Taiwanese. You're not American. And so you just feel like, well, is there a place where I could belong? Is there a place that I could call home? And when I became a Christian and I learned that that there was a place that I could call fully home, that I had citizenship in the kingdom of God. That no matter what happens on earth, no matter how corrupt a government, no matter what countries and governments get destroyed or created, this part didn't make it into the film, but I did a long interview with my father about his experience growing up in Burma.

SueAnn Shiah:

It just didn't really fit into the arc, but something he told me that I didn't know was that growing up because his parents had fled China and settled in Burma they were countryless people because there was a turnover of government. So there was the Republic of China, which is like a government of Taiwan that was in power. That was like the democratic elected community that came up after the fall of the Chinese Empire. But a little bit after World War II ended, the nationalists and the communists fought and the communist won. So that's the government that is in power in China. Now their government is called the People's Republic of China. And so like citizenship to the Republic of China is a totally different passport than citizenship to the peoples. They're different.

SueAnn Shiah:

And so my grandparents, when they fled China, they basically forfeited whatever existence they had in China and they went to Burma, but then Burma wasn't going to give them citizenship. So my dad said they had papers that just said, no country, no land. Literally like, where do you belong? And in the '70s, I believe Taiwan offered citizenship to any displaced Chinese nationals. Because there were Chinese people all over the world that didn't have citizenship, that they were displaced because of the cycles of war and the overturning of governments. So anyone of Chinese ethnic heritage could come and they could get citizenship in Taiwan and that's how my dad's side ended up in Taiwan.

SueAnn Shiah:

Yeah, I think about what it feels like, like my dad, literally not having any papers that say you don't belong anywhere and growing up here in the states, but yeah, no matter what government's topple are erected. And like I have citizenship in Christ and that's my home and I can take that with me wherever I go. And nothing on earth, no power on earth can threaten that. I guess that's my way of also saying like my album, the music that I made, those are the themes of home that are there is I've been thinking a lot about Sukkot, which is the of booths. Sometimes it's called the feast of Tabernacles, the Hebrew children are called to celebrate in the Old Testament. It's a celebration time of remembrance of their wandering in the desert.

SueAnn Shiah:

And so what they do is they erect these tents or booths and then they sleep and eat in them during the time of this feast. Everything in the Sukkot is just to be holy or blessed. There's prayers you say over everything and it's like, wait, this is like holy camping. You're like, well, that's what the children of Israel did for 40 years. And you can see that as exile, but you can also see as a time when God was teaching them things and providing for them and that those are things to be remembered and celebrated. So I feel like I've lived my life in a lot of ways in a tent wandering. But the glorious thing about that is knowing that it's temporary. That the promise land is real, that God is leading us to and repairing our hearts for, and that God is biting for us during this time.

SueAnn Shiah:

When else do you get to see a cloud by day and the fire by night, like literally having a visual confirmation of presence of the kingdom of God. I think of all this wilderness time. A lot of us who are without churches now or faith communities because of issues of racism and homophobia or misogyny and sexism and all that stuff. And the thing that I've learned in the wilderness is that God is real. There are trade offs, but all of it is good and all of it is preparing us to go home to a final home.

Amena Brown:

I told you not to make me cry SueAnn, and I feel like throughout this conversation, you are testing me. You are testing me on my tears right now.

SueAnn Shiah:

I think a lot of my Black friends feel the same way because it's like Africa, you can't go back to the end but the places of trauma that your family only has been for generations are on indigenous people's lands. You got to find a way to find home and to make home even as you travel in a tent and you're wondering. And you know that there's nothing on earth that will ever be able to give you the satisfaction that you long for. And that's why I think that my heart is always turned to anchored in the home that God is making for me, because that's something nobody and no one can ever take away from me.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. I love that. To me that sounds like you live in your present life, but you are also rooted in eternity. You are rooted also in a life that is beyond the life we see right now. And there is such groundedness in that. You worded that so beautifully. So I now know that you are returning to Taiwan for your masters at National Taiwan University.

SueAnn Shiah:

That's right.

Amena Brown:

I mean, I feel I was about to say sip the tea, but I feel like when you say you're going to sip the tea, it's like, tell me some forbidden thing you weren't going to tell anyone. So I don't know if it's tea.

SueAnn Shiah:

It's out in public everywhere.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. So it's not like...

SueAnn Shiah:

I made some announcements.

Amena Brown:

I want you to tell me more about this and what is it feeling like right now to think about returning to Taiwan? And now in this case, you'll be returning there for a longer period of time. How did that come about and how are you processing this new part of your journey?

SueAnn Shiah:

Well, the funny thing is that it does go back to the same weekend that we met each other because I was in LA for the CCDA Conference and the women of color retreat. And it was such an important life changing week for me, that time in LA. My church helped me to pay for my plane ticket. My girl Zekia got me a free pass to the conference. One of my friends offered me to place to stay. It was just one of those amazing everything God provided and it fell together moments I got to go to LA. And I was so excited that there were so many Asians because my life is pretty Asian less. And especially in Nashville and to be surrounded by so many other justice loving Asian Christians was a gift.

SueAnn Shiah:

I literally didn't go to any other workshops. I just was like, I'm just going to only to the Asian ones and talking to people who were asking similar questions that I was and thinking about justice and theology and the Asian American experience and it was amazing. I met a lot of people from Fuller during that time too, and heard about the Asian American Center there and I was like, that sounds like something I want to do. And thinking about where my gifts and my calling was. I'd been in Nashville for six years and I thought that I was going to live there for the rest of my life and build a recording studio and just be a producer and do whatever other fun stuff I wanted to do. But I in that weekend realized that I had a calling to go and write Asian American theology.

SueAnn Shiah:

And as I thought through what that was going to look like, what the preparation I needed to do in order to do that job well. I wanted go to seminary but I had also always had this longing to go back to Taiwan. So after I finished my documentary, I answered so many questions. I learned so many things, but it ended up giving me more questions than it answered. I realized that there was a limitation to what I could learn and study on my own without literally moving to Taiwan and doing more formal intentional study.

SueAnn Shiah:

So I always wanted to go back. I always wanted to improve my Chinese. I always wanted to deepen my understanding, but once I realized I wanted to go to seminary, I wanted to write and published Asian American theology, all these little pieces that have been floating around for years clicked into place and I was like, I'm going to go back to Taiwan to do grad school in Asian studies, and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to seminary and then I'm going to write and publish theology. That's the bigger picture of how I ended up deciding I wanted to go back. I looked at a couple different programs, all Taiwan history program, Asian study, Asian Pacific, global studies, whatever a lot of programs like that.

SueAnn Shiah:

People often ask me like, "Oh, why go all the way back to Taiwan to do this?" I'm like, "Well, I want to learn Asian studies from a non-Western perspective." I want to learn Asian studies from Asian people. I want to learn history and philosophy from the traditions to which they've been passed down, not like translated interpreted through a Western lens and regurgitated. I want to just learn from my own people and a big part of my like decolonization process with my faith and with my life and my worldview. I wanted to be specifically in that context and not only learn Chinese philosophy in a Christian seminary, I wanted to just learn Chinese philosophy from people who study that and then do the work of course, on my own of seeing how that integrates and doesn't integrate with my faith as a Christian.

SueAnn Shiah:

I wanted to do all of those things and going back to school in Taiwan made sense. The reason I decided to do this musicology program, National Taiwan University is the number one university in Taiwan and I wanted to go there. It's where I studied before when I studied abroad in college. It's where my dad did his undergrad, but they don't have an Asian studies program. And so I was looking for other programs in the cultural studies, history, literature, philosophy, language that it would give me the freedom to do an interdisciplinary approach and their musicology program looked amazing.

SueAnn Shiah:

Music is my primary medium, even though I do a lot of work in a lot of different mediums. And a lot of my philosophical theological work, my critical media, like analysis stuff is rooted in my understanding and fluency in music and music history. So the musicology program just made a lot of sense. I actually just registered for my class two nights ago, and I was looking through the course list and I felt very good about my decision because I was like, "This is so dope. Look at this music and gender class. Look at this like mind, body spirituality and music course. Look at like recordings in east Asia pre 1945. This is just so...." I was like, "These are the classes I get to take." This is my primary curriculum and these are professors who have been addressing what is colonialism? How has it affected culture and art and music in particular specifically?

SueAnn Shiah:

So one other thing that I think I just want to note is that in Asia, we have a lot of history of colonialism, whether it was the Chinese colonizing Taiwan or the Japanese colonizing the Chinese who were colonizing Taiwan or Japanese colonizing Korea. All of these different instances and I fascinated to examine what that process and indoctrination looks like when race isn't the issue, when it's intrarace, intraracial. We have just a really American view of colonization of race, of all these claims to land claims, to cultural genocide, what does that look like?

SueAnn Shiah:

So I was really excited to be able to examine. I feel like in order to do Asian American theology or Asian American studies at all, you both have to understand the context of what it means to be Asian and America, but also the histories of trauma that our communities bring with us from our home countries. And it's often a barrier within Asian American organizing is that everybody's family was all killed by the Japanese during World War II. So everyone hates the Japanese, but in America, because we're all racialized in a similar way, we end up making friends with the same people that our parents all like hate. So those are often barriers to organizing and it's like, how do we even reconcile that stuff when there's no context for understanding it in America, because they all think we look the same.

Amena Brown:

This is so powerful, Sue Anne, just to hear you articulating the layers of this. And it's super exciting to think about what you're going to get to study. I'm just like, oh my gosh, just thinking when you're naming the classes, just now I'm like, I don't even know music that well. I mean, I love it as a fan, but the technical parts of it and the theory and those things, I don't know those parts, but just thinking about getting to dive into that deeply and getting to dive into it in your homeland and wow.

SueAnn Shiah:

Music education in the states is so Eurocentric, and I feel like if you take any world music class, it's like you're expected to learn everything about the rest of the world's music, but everything is always Eurocentric. And so just reading through the syllabus. The syllabi that I was scanning through, I was just like, there's so many texts and so many concepts like we're going to of course address some Western ideas, but largely it seems like they're very rooted. This is one of the core competencies of this department is wanting a uniquely Asian approach to music college and not just trying to like one up whatever the Western world's way of doing things like uniquely Asian way. I told them in my interview, I was like, that's why I want to go here, because that's what I want and that's what I can't get in the states.

Amena Brown:

Wow. For listeners who may be sitting at the inner a section of a lot of different identities, whether that is cultural or gender or just all these different layers we have, what's the advice or the words of care that you would say to someone who's sitting at this inner section of all these identities trying to make sense of that, trying to embrace parts of it. Like you said, also trying to decenter some parts of it. What would be the words you would say for the person that may be feeling lost right now in trying to grapple through all of however that looks for them in their life?

SueAnn Shiah:

So my freshman year at Belmont... Well, so we have this program called the first year seminar program. So everyone takes this class and you read this book and then they bring in a speaker who talks to everyone. So the great gift I had was the speaker was Makoto Fujimura and I was actually already familiar with his work in Christian art world. I was totally geeking out and his entire presentation was on the concept of liminality and talking about his own experiences as a Japanese American artist and the ostracization, the marginalization you experience as a liminal person, but also your ability to synthesize, your ability to see from multiple perspectives.

SueAnn Shiah:

I think that for everybody who, for instance, doesn't know where to call home, something about how to make home, wherever you are. And for somebody who feels different and marginalized wherever they go, you have the ability to find what you have in common with other people, even when you don't have everything in common. I think that all of our greatest strengths are also our greatest weaknesses. And as I was going through my racial identity, process my... Or we call it a racial awakening or my queer awakening, I was realizing God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong and the foolish things to shame the wise. And so all the things the world tells me about myself or that marginalizes me for are also like things that are gifts. I just have to learn how to use them. But nobody's going to teach me how to do that because the world isn't designed to teach me how to thrive like that.

SueAnn Shiah:

I'm going to have to invest in myself and look for art and look for writers and women of color and queer women of color and Christian queer theology, like all of this stuff, I'm going to have to make a lot of it myself, but I'm also going to have to go find it because no one is going to find it for me. So I think that that's how you change your identity from being a victim to being someone who is a survivor. I'm using that phrasing because I actually had the privilege of getting to hear Tarana Burke speak in Detroit in June, she was speaking at the Allied Media Conference and I was presenting a workshop. And so for those who don't know, Burke is the founder of the #MeToo and movement.

SueAnn Shiah:

She talked about that concept. People are like, survivor versus victim. She said she doesn't really like the idea that people use is like a thing you arrive at rather it's you're surviving and you're learning to do that. But I do think there's a lot of redemption to be had. There's a lot of reclamation to be had and mourn. I definitely think we need to mourn and lament, but also know that what you can get out of your life in the world is not all only what the world is promising you, which is not very much. I think that all of us, whether you are like a straight white cyst heterosexual, like man, or you're a queer trans woman of color. We all have multiple intersecting identities and they all interact with each other in unique ways. It's just that when your intersecting identities are marginalized, it's when you realize that they exist.

SueAnn Shiah:

We don't operate out of the assumption that people who have quote intersectional identities are the marginalized. No, the people in power have them too. The only thing is they aren't forced to confront them because their experiences are centered and normalized. So that's the other thing too, is like, you're not weird or different. You just live in a world that is structured to make you feel that way. Everybody has a lot of stuff they have to deal with. Everybody's life is complex. It's just that privilege is written in invisible ink. And it's until you turn up the heat that you can start to see it on the paper.

Amena Brown:

Goes to write poem about these quotes that SueAnn is saying, please takes [crosstalk].

SueAnn Shiah:

Have you ever done that with the lemon juice? Like write invisible ink, the lemon juice thing?

Amena Brown:

No. I need the education.

SueAnn Shiah:

I'm just being a super nerd. So you can write messages with lemon juice and then you can take a blow dryer. You can use an iron and then once... So you can send it to somebody and it looks like a blank page, but then they put heat on it and then the words will appear on it because the juice will oxidize or something. It'll turn brown. So that was what I was trying to say about privilege is written in an invisible ink is like you'll get this piece of paper. It looks blank, but once you turn up the heat on it, then you'll start to see all the stuff that's written there.

Amena Brown:

SueAnn, speak a word. Speak a word today.

SueAnn Shiah:

I've spoken so many words.

Amena Brown:

It is a word. I'm like tries to write poem about lemon juice and invisible ink. Okay. Yes. 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 iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 65

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of HER with Amena Brown. You know what I haven't talked enough about in these first few episodes of the year is our HER living room. I just want to bring you back to that visual. I don't know where you are, where you may be listening. I get messages from a few of you, so I know some of you are working from home and you're listening from there, some of you may be commuting, you're listening in your car, some of you are on public transportation, headed to work or headed to play, wherever you're headed, some of you are listening late at night.

Amena Brown:

I don't know the vibes, but just know, when you're listening to this podcast, my goal is still for you to feel that you are gathered in our girlfriend's living room, gathered in the living room space that is where you bring your little bits of snacks, it's where there's no judgment for the combination of snacks that you bring to together. Welcome back to our worn couch situation in the living room, because isn't that the best couch, where it's just worn enough. That's the best couch, just like a pair of jeans, just worn enough. Okay?

Amena Brown:

Speaking of being with girlfriends in the living room, this episode, we are talking about the friends that we need in our lives. I think I've discussed on here that I spent the latter end part of the year, into the beginning of the new year, watching through Real Housewives of New York. Whenever I go through periods of time where I'm experiencing high anxiety, for some reason, there's something about the Real Housewives franchise that is soothing to me. I don't know what that says about me, I'm not going to get into trying to psychoanalyze that about myself, but it's just true.

Amena Brown:

There was this scene where one of the Housewives was ... It was actually a reunion scene and they were talking about Bethenny Frankel. They were talking about how she always orders really well for the table. Whenever they would go to a restaurant, she would typically research the restaurant in advance, she would call the restaurant ahead and say, "When we sit down, here's the food we want to come out while everyone is still figuring out what they want to order." I was like, "Oh my gosh, what a wonderful friend to have." It's so good to have a friend like that, which sent my mind going to who are the friends that we really need in our lives? In this episode, let's talk about that.

Amena Brown:

The first friend that you need is a cussing friend. I need to start right here. I need to start right here, because I didn't realize the importance of having a cussing friend until maybe several years ago, the last several years of my life. I happen to have a couple of friends in my life that are just truly the best at cussing, and cussing in a moment where you don't have the other words to articulate your situation. I also want to submit to you all that I know that I am the cussing friend for some of my friends. I'm not going to do all that cussing on this podcast, but there are a few of my friends that would be like, "It's her, she's the one that's doing the cussing." If you're listening to this and when I said cussing friend you got uncomfortable, then the cussing friend isn't you, you probably have some cussing friends. If you have some friends that listen to this podcast and they also reach out to you when they get to this part, then it's you, you are the friend that cusses.

Amena Brown:

I'll tell you a moment that I realized having a cussing friend is really important. Oh my gosh, y'all, woo. I was just thinking about this moment. I want to give a shout out to my friend, Nish, Nish Weiseth, she is just a fabulous person. I may just need to reach out to her and just call her real quick and talk crazy to her for five minutes, because this story is about her, a real life story.

Amena Brown:

I was at a women's conference, Nish and I and several of our mutual friends were at this conference. I'm just going to keep it real with y'all. My husband and I were going through some struggles trying to get pregnant. I can't remember if this happened before or after I had to go on stage, I think it happened before, that someone that I knew came up to me at that event and announced to me her pregnancy. If you're listening to this and you have ever experienced loss or miscarriage, experienced infertility in any way, you know exactly what I'm talking about, that you can have this moment inside where when you are struggling, you're trying to get pregnant and it's not going well for you, and someone else announces their pregnancy to you, you are exceedingly happy for them and you are also feeling such heartbreak for yourself. That can really be a hard thing to describe to someone if they've never been through it.

Amena Brown:

Nish in the green room of this conference with me, watching this moment happen. She knew some of the behind-the-scenes of my life. After this friend told me her announcement, I did a really great job not showing to her how much I was breaking inside. Then she left and I went to sit down next to Nish, and Nish turned and looked at me and she said the F-bomb so loud and so pointedly. I just never thought I would appreciate it hearing the F-bomb in that context, in that moment, but there wasn't anything else to say. There was no advice to give, there was nothing she could say to fix it or make it feel any better, but just her saying the F-bomb to me in that moment just had me like, "Yes," just have me like, "Thank you, girl, for feeling me in this moment."

Amena Brown:

You need a friend like that, because sometimes, here I go being the cussing friend, but sometimes hard shit is going to happen in your life. The truth is, sometimes there'll be such hard things that can happen to you that even when people who are praying people go to pray, they may not even have the exact words to pray. I'm a person who also thinks that cussing can be prayer too, because I think God understands that, understands our humanity and how we feel when life just hits us in these really, really hard ways. When you have a cussing friend, it's really nice because sometimes they can use their cuss words to articulate a thing that you are struggling to put words to. Sometimes just them saying a word that in some circles of people would be considered a really inappropriate word to say feels really great in certain situations.

Amena Brown:

You should have a cussing friend. Even if you don't cuss yourself, you should have a cussing friend. If you do cuss yourself, sometimes you need a cussing friend that's very cuss articulate, that just can really draw a nice phrase that you need. Shout out to the cussing friend, it's important, and shout out to my girl, Nish, because that was a real moment between she and I.

Amena Brown:

Okay, the next type of friend that need is a curator friend. This is a person that they know certain things really well. It could be a person who knows music very well, it could be a person who knows good books, it could be a person who knows film, knows television shows, knows house decor or house organization things. It could be many things that that person can be really interested in, but they go beyond being just an enthusiast about those things. This is a person that not only is excited or interested in that particular subject matter, but if you went to them and said, "Hey, I'm looking to dabble in this blah, blah, blah, genre of stuff. Where do you think I should start?" that person would then be able to go through the things they know and curate to you, "Hmm, I think you would like this book because of these reasons," or they might even know enough about the subject matter to say to you, "Tell me what you're looking for when you're looking for this type of thing."

Amena Brown:

I'll give you an example. My friend Leigh is a fantastic curator of, I would say of books general, but very specifically, I ask her sometimes to give me romance recommendations because I know this is a genre that she reads. During the pandemic, I've talked to you in previous episodes about how I picked up on reading more romance because I just needed to read some books that were about the newness of love and always have a happy ending. I just needed that everything's going to turn out good for these characters.

Amena Brown:

When I went to her and said, "Hey, I'm thinking about reading more romance, who should I read?" she had this immediate list of questions, asking me different things. Was I looking for authors of color? Was I looking for Black women authors? Was I looking for a certain level of heat in the book itself? I answered those questions, and then she is a wonderful friend, she sent me an email with like, "Here are the things I would suggest for you based upon what you described to me are your interests." It was sort of like she used these answers to her questions that I gave her, she used her knowledge of me, and she used her knowledge of the things that she knows well.

Amena Brown:

It is wonderful to have a curator friend in your life. It could be someone who, like my friend Leigh, knows books. It could be someone who knows good TV shows. I feel like I watch a good bit of TV, maybe a lot of TV is probably more than a good bit, but anyways, I watch a lot of TV and so I do have people sometimes ask me, "Hey, what did you think about this show? Do you think I would like it?" and I can say, "Here's what I liked about this show. I don't think you would like it. I don't recommend you watch it, but here's what's good about it," or if people come to me and say, "I want to watch something else on TV." I'm totally that person.

Amena Brown:

I can also be that person about music too. It depends on the type of music, because I'm not going to lie to y'all that there's a certain type of music I like and a certain type of music I don't. I'm not as much of a wide span, listens to just all the music person, but if the person comes to me and their tastes are similar to mine, then I might be like, "Oh, here's a starting place. Here's where I would start. Here's what I think about blah, blah, blah."

Amena Brown:

You should get you a good curator friend. Get you some friends that know about some things that you don't know that much about and would be willing to give you tips on how you can start dipping your toe in the water of knowing more about that.

Amena Brown:

Next, this is what Bethenny Frankel inspired me, in seeing this particular season of Real Housewives of New York. You need a foodie friend, okay? A foodie friend can present themselves in a couple of different ways. Number one, a foodie friend is someone who knows how to order food well. I'm going to tell you, the person and in my life who is the best orderer of food is my husband. I have to say, he's like this about food and he's also like this about cocktails too.

Amena Brown:

When we were dating, our first several dates, I feel like I ordered badly. I don't know if I was ordering safe, I don't know if I was nervous because we were on our first several dates, but I feel like pretty consistently our first several dates, his order came to the table and I immediately regretted what I ordered. After doing that a few times, then I would look at the menu and I would tell him, "These are the three things I'm looking at. Which of these do you think that I would like, or do you think I should try?" He would say, "I would try this one, this one. I wouldn't try that one because of the type of restaurant this is."

Amena Brown:

I think I was making some mistakes, like if you go to a steakhouse place, it depends on the place if getting something else other than steak is actually going to work out, or if you go to a place that pasta is the central of the menu, you might order a sandwich there and be sorely disappointed, right? I feel like I was making those kinds of mistakes, which may have been just because I was so happy to just hang out with him that I wasn't paying much attention to the menu.

Amena Brown:

Then sometimes, now that we've gotten married, sometimes what he'll do is if I'm looking on the menu and I see two or three things that I'm like, "Oh, I can't really decide," he'll be like, "Why don't you order this and I'll order that, and then you could try both things," which is really sweet. It's really sweet when you are dating or in a relationship with someone that is willing to take that risk, they're willing to throw that dice out there. But I just started to trust his palette there.

Amena Brown:

As it relates to cocktails, I am a person who I think as I've gotten older, my palate has become a bit more adventurous, but as previously stated in some other episodes, I was very new to drinking. I didn't start drinking until I was in my late twenties, so it has taken me some time I'm to figure out, am I a person who likes wine, or am I a person who likes wine with this kind of meal? Am I a person who likes a cocktail? What type of cocktail do I like? What kind of bitters do I prefer? What are the things in a cocktail that excite me? There are times that I would ask Matt, "When you look at the menu, what are the top two or three things you would order?" and I would order out of his list of things, and I would do the same with the cocktails. That is the plus of having a foodie friend, that they know how to order food well, okay?

Amena Brown:

The other type of foodie friend you need is someone who knows how to suss out a good restaurant. I feel like I pride myself on being this friend, but I didn't start being a person that susses out a good restaurant because I wanted to be a foodie friend, I think this happened to me because I was traveling all the time. Well, it was a combination of the fact that I was traveling all the time for work and that, in my thirties, I discovered that I was going to have to for a while go dairy-free. I mean, now I can have some dairy, but I had to have a period of time where I was going to go dairy-free. I had to limit the hormone-induced foods that I was eating. It meant that that limited the amount of chain restaurants that I could eat at.

Amena Brown:

Then over time, Matt and I traveled together mostly for many years, and so when we would travel together, it became this thing like I just really honestly feel like life is too short to eat bad food. That's just how I feel about it. Just because you're traveling and you're away from home and you may be in a place that has restaurants that you're not familiar with, whether they're chains or mom-and-pop shops, I really became a lot less interested in eating at the restaurants I knew and more interested in wanting to know, well, where are we and what is the best cuisine that you can have here? What's the stuff that people always want to make sure they eat when they're in blah, blah, blah city? Matt and I started making a rule for ourselves that we would not, for the most part, unless we were in a pinch, we wouldn't go looking for some national chain that we knew. If we had the time, we were going to find some place there that's really good food.

Amena Brown:

A lot of times, some of the places that are really good food, of course they're local places. A lot of times they're also locally sourced, which was really helpful for a lot of my dietary restrictions. Sometimes it was not healthy food at all, it was just going to be delicious. I remember one time, Matt and I, we had performed at this college in East Texas, and it was one of those places where ... This would happen to us all the time because we did a lot of Christian youth and Christian college events. You'd fly into like the major airport, but then you'd have to drive like an hour and a half or two hours to get to whatever the school was in the middle of no place. The school was in East Texas, but we had to fly into Houston.

Amena Brown:

It's one of those hustles where we had to perform, speak, whatever we were doing at the college in the morning, and then we had to hustle the one-and-a-half to two hours back to get back to the airport in time for our flight. We were so hungry. We were electing not to eat in the college cafeteria because I have spoken at many colleges across the country, I have yet to meet one that I was like, "Wow, I'm really glad I ate here instead of this restaurant."

Amena Brown:

Here is how I suss out if it's a good restaurant. If I've had the time prior to traveling to said city, I will look up the list of top 10 places you should eat in Houston, top five best restaurants in Houston. I'll look up those things so that I can know what we are close to or not. The other thing I do is I cross reference the list with Yelp, because sometimes a thing could end up on a list and maybe the list was three years ago and maybe the chef or whoever that was doing the cooking at that time is not there anymore, so sometimes the lists are not always as current as what's on Yelp. If I see a restaurant on a list and I go to Yelp, it always has to be four stars and above. I don't play games about it, okay?

Amena Brown:

When I'm in Atlanta, I'm not going to lie, I know my restaurants here. There are some restaurants I frequent that have three-and-a-half star reviews on Yelp, but I have eaten there. It's pretty consistent food. I'm not looking for this amazingly gourmet meal. I'm going there because there's a particular taco I love over there or there's a particular sandwich I want to eat it over there. But when I'm out of town, no games. You can't afford to risk your self on three stars in a city you're unfamiliar with. You can't afford to do it. It has to be four stars and above.

Amena Brown:

Now, Matt and I are in a situation where there wasn't really a way to search the restaurants in advance because we technically weren't in Houston. By the time we got to Houston, we were going to have to get on the plane. We had to find, between this college in the middle of nowhere and Houston, Texas, where can we eat? Okay, I go on Yelp. I find a four-star po'boy restaurant. This is the stuff of dreams, okay? This is the stuff of dreams, a four-star po'boy restaurant that just happens to be between this old place and Houston? Sure. Matt and I are like, "You know what? We're going to take the risk, throw the dice on it."

Amena Brown:

We drive up to the place and it literally looks like you have pulled up to your aunt's house. It's a small, little, one-story house. It had all these different colors. The way it was painted, the shutters were different colors, from the wall were different colors, from the one wall over here was a different color from this wall. It was just all sorts of different colors.

Amena Brown:

We go inside, it's a Black-owned restaurant and they are pictures of the family up on the walls. We look at each other and we're pretty sure this is about to be some of the best food This little house, little hole in the wall type spot, four stars in the middle of not quite being in a metropolitan area, yes, please. We had two of the best po'boys I've ever had in my entire life that day. I want to say we had to eat half of our sandwiches in the restaurant, and then because we were in a time crunch, we had to wrap everything up and hurry up and leave. The sandwich was so good that we were like, "If we don't wrap this up and hurry up and leave, we going to be late and we going to miss our flight."

Amena Brown:

I love to be this person that susses out a good restaurant, because typically if I'm meeting with my friends and the other friend that I'm meeting up with, like say if I go visit a friend out of town and if the friend that I'm about to go visit is not a foodie, then I always take it upon myself to pick the restaurant because I feel like that saves me from being annoyed, it's going to give great food to all of us, and we get a chance to try some things, even in the city where they live. You need a foodie friend who can suss out a good restaurant. It's a bonus if your friend also knows food cities and travels.

Amena Brown:

I'm going to tell y'all that one of my ... I used to say it was a post-pandemic dream and sometimes I'm like, "Amena, will we ever be post-pandemic?" It's really hard for me to imagine that life right now. Maybe it's more like when things are less risky, when it's less risky to travel and really vacation in the way that I would like to do it. I spent a lot of time traveling to places for work. Every now and then, I feel like Matt and I, towards the end of our stint traveling, we were getting better at making sure that if we were traveling to an area that we really loved, that we would stay a couple of extra days. My hometown is San Antonio, and so whenever I get a gig in Austin or anywhere near there, my best friend and her husband are there and so I almost always am going to stay over an extra couple of days just to hang out with them and just do whatever.

Amena Brown:

Chicago is another one of our favorite food cities, so we would always at least try to give ourselves an extra day to make sure we hit our spots, hit Portillo's and make sure we got some Lou Malnati's pizza while we were in town, and Stan's Donuts. There's just some places that we were like, "Oh, I got to do it."

Amena Brown:

My dream now that I have been home for almost two years, I haven't taken a flight y'all in almost exactly two years, next month will make exactly two years since I have been on a plane, which is the longest I have not been on plane since I was a child. I have thought about the previous life that I had, that Matt and I were doing together when we were on the road traveling a lot. Of course I missed the stage, and I do believe in time I'll be able to safely get back to that, but I realized I missed traveling and I missed traveling more than I missed traveling for work. It is a dream of mine in this next decade or two of life to go back to some of those cities that we went to for work and really fell in love with the food and just have time that we're just back to that city to eat and probably go see some of the art that's there, if there's a show to see.

Amena Brown:

I feel like Chicago is a city that's like that, LA is like that to me, New York is like that. Miami is a city that I've been to, but I haven't really gotten a chance to experience the food, so it's one of my food cities that I would want to visit. New Orleans, we went to New Orleans for an anniversary and I was like, "Oh my gosh, we just came here and we just got to sleep and eat food and listen to jazz. Yes." I want to get back to actually traveling to enjoy the cities there and enjoy the food. Yes, honey, I'm here. I am here to be the foodie friend as needed.

Amena Brown:

Next friend you need is a fashion friend. I'm going to tell y'all right now, I am nobody's fashion friend. Not a one of my friends would tell you that Amena helps me with my fashions, okay? It has never been a gift for me, which is why I need a fashion friend. My top fashion friend is my sister, who is also one of my best friends. It's like my sister could be in a pair of sweatpants and it just looks amazing. I will be places with my sister and people, they cannot stop looking at her because she's just gorgeous in general, but then added to that, she just dresses in this way that it looks so effortless. But if I were to try to wear those same exact outfits, it would look so terrible. She's my top fashion friend.

Amena Brown:

If I'm buying clothes for myself, I like for her to be in the mall with me, because I'm very much like a creature of habit and a creature of comfort. I'm not as bad now as I used to be, but I used to be very like, "Oh," I walked into Express and I tried on this one shirt, it looked nice, so I would just buy that shirt in four colors. She was like, "I know you like shirts like that and that's why you bought that shirt and that many colors, but I don't think you should buy that kind of shirt anymore because I don't think it looks flattering on you." She would be that honest, that is part of what a fashion friend does.

Amena Brown:

I want to give a shout out to one of my best friends, Kimberly. She is also a person who knows how to dress. She pays attention to what's trending and what's in fashion and stuff like that. She was the person in my twenties that was the first person to tell me, "This shoe that you bought is a winter shoe." She was like, "You're not supposed to wear this shoe year round like this." She was the first person that told me that.

Amena Brown:

I want to give a shout out to my friend and collaborator, Michelle Norris, who has styled me for quite a few of the shoots that you have seen me do over the past few years, some of that is the work of Michelle Norris. You can have a lot of different ways that you can work with a stylist. You can work with a stylist where they have your measurements, your sizes, what you're looking for, and they go around to different places and pull outfits for you. Then they either bring them to you or you go to their space and look through what they pull. But that wasn't as helpful for me in trying to figure out how to be fashionable.

Amena Brown:

I would ask Michelle if instead of doing that, if I could go with her to the stores that she would go to, if she were to pull outfits or something for me. Michelle doesn't even do styling like that really as a part of her work anymore, but she would do this with me on the side, as she still had a little side hustle with me. We would just go out there and have a certain number of hours that I'd be like, "I will pay you, come out here and help me do this."

Amena Brown:

We would go and look through the different stores and she would pick things for me to try on that I would never pick off the rack for myself. Michelle Norris is the reason that I wear jumpsuits to this day, because I couldn't get past the fact that when I would see other women in jumpsuits, I would think they looked gorgeous, but I really had a question that I couldn't ask because most of the women I saw wearing them were strangers, which is how do you go to the bathroom with all that stuff on? For those of you who know I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, I thank you for understanding the reference. I was just like, "I want to know how you go to the bathroom, because I can't figure that out. I'm never going to wear this," and she was like, "Please go in and try this on." She was like, "I think your body would be perfect in jumpsuits," and turns out it was.

Amena Brown:

Shout out to the fashion friend. They can help you out of a fashion rut, they can be honest with you when you are wearing things that do not look good on you, but it's not just that they're over critical, they can also help you find the things that do look good on you, that do make you feel good, that do express your sense of style.

Amena Brown:

We're going to have a part two of this because I have a few more other friend stories and friend suggestions that I want to give you, but yes, everybody needs that friend. Join me in the living room next time when we talk about what are the other friends we need.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 64

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown, this week. And as of the day this episode is airing, it is the day after Valentine's day. So I hope at the very least, if you're able, you would get some discounted candy today, because this is your time. Valentine's Day is fine and all, but really, the 15th as a holiday, of being able to go and get candy at a discount is a really important day. That day and November 1st, being the day after Halloween, these are two really important candy days right there. So I hope you are taking advantage of that. And in honor of it being the day after Valentine's Day, I was working through the episode ideas with my assistant Leigh and I was like, "Oh, this episode's going to fall the day after Valentine's Day." I was like, "I wonder if I should do a love poem or a breakup poem." And Leigh was like, "Definitely a breakup poem." She was like, "There's enough love poems out there."

Amena Brown:

So I reached deep into the Amena Brown poetry archives, for a poem that I very, very rarely ever do in public. So you are hearing this here first only, I don't know. So I wanted to dig deep into these archives, that we might take the day after Valentine's Day to discuss my business and how I processed this breakup in my late 20s, bless my heart. Normally when we do a Behind The Poetry episode, I have a recording, but this is the first time that I don't have one because I have never recorded this poem before. So I literally was writing this poem post breaking up with someone, actually that's not accurate, I was writing this poem post being broken up with, which I think is a very different scenario. So this poem does not have a creative title, I just called it a breakup poem because that's just the truth. So here's the poem, and then let's go behind the poetry.

Amena Brown:

He said, "We need to talk." Studies show "we need to talk" is never followed by marriage proposal, never ends with grandiose professions of love. We were breaking up. I was about to sit across the table and look into the eyes of a man I had come to love, watch him point to his heart and say, "Love don't live here anymore." Maybe it never did, I would wonder, as film reel of kisses and conversations held in whispers would run through my mind for months to come. We were civil. As always, he was cool, calm, and I was trying so hard to be strong. Hadn't I been prepared for this? For weeks he had been distant, contemplating how two people so different could somehow gain passports into each other's world.

Amena Brown:

I pep talked to myself into believing I could leave the dream of all the sweet and unique things that made him him, that made him mine, that time would heal all wounds. And I've heard people say it hurts like hell and I've never been there to know how much hell hurts. It must burn, it must sting like needles pricking the bottom of eyelids makes you cry, like watching a horrible situation unfold right before your eyes, helpless to stop it. It hurt like hell and there was no way to stop it. Sometimes I play the what if game, with no 50/50, no lifeline, just if, then statements. If I knew then what I know now, would we even have tried? Would we have put our friendship on the line, letting curiosity deal us roulette, placing bets on feelings we hoped could grow from seeds to trees, become stunted at seedling roots entangling. Now dangling twisted casualties of our love experiment gone wrong.

Amena Brown:

Hoping a friendship would keep us as each other's option, should we ever discover how to love each other the way we said we wanted to be loved. I had to go through the painful process of getting over him, until I ran out of random excuses to call him. Until I could look at him and not want to hold or be held by him. Until I could see him with another woman and not think she'll never be better for you than me. Until I could be honest with myself, say, "He doesn't want me anymore," without my voice trembling or my eyes watering. Until I could stop hoping he'd come to his senses and forget about this whole breaking up thing. Until I could move on. Letting him go left me alone with unknown variable X, with too many daytime minutes to ask why, with A to Z memories of him and how I could learn to be me again without such an important letter, but I did it.

Amena Brown:

I grew up and who knew I could be become a little less selfish, a little more honest and a lot more vulnerable. So gratitude to God and thanks to him. I never thought I would appreciate this guy for walking away, but I do. And even though I do, and I will and writing out our wills and finding the will to stay in step, no matter where our paths might intercept, I'm a better woman because of you. And all that thinking and crying you left me to do. And I don't blame you, you had your reasons.

Amena Brown:

And you and I can leave those reasons where they lie and sometimes visit them, leaving lessons like blooms at the tomb of maybe what we probably could have been someday. And one day, some other man will become the he I'll smile about, and he will not be you. But he will be loved better because of you, because I got to practice loving with you, that in the end, hurt doesn't have to win unless we want it to. To prove hope is a better bag to carry than bitterness. That a closed fist is never open to receiving anything. That a narrow mind is never open to seeing anything, that if a broken heart refuses to mend, it will never learn to love again. But I learned to love you, and I'll learn to love again.

Amena Brown:

Okay, well, let's just get deep in my business. I try, at least every few months to give you one episode where you can get deep in my business, if that is something you have desired in your life, to be deep into my business. So first question is what made me write this poem? And this poem was written when I was 28 years old, if I'm remembering right, it was written post my first adult exclusive dating relationship, that of course consequentially became my first adult breakup. And the real life story behind writing this poem, I have to start back a little bit before actually getting to this relationship, so that you will understand why this relationship was such a huge deal to 20-something Amena. So I really didn't have much dating history. I think I dated two guys in high school. One of them, I told y'all a little story about in the episode that I did on That Time I...Went to Spelman, and he was what I would consider to have been my high school boyfriend, but we were not allowed to go anywhere.

Amena Brown:

When I say we were not allowed, I think his parents would've allowed us. My mom was not allowing us to go places together besides church and family gatherings. So I can probably count on one hand the amount of times me and that high school boyfriend, and not just one hand, actually, one finger, the amount of times me and that high school boyfriend actually were in a room alone together for an extended period of time. And the one time I can think, that we were in his room, we were in his room, we were alone there, but it was for a short period of time in his parents house while his parents were home. So I use dating very loosely to describe that relationship. And then I went on my first real date towards the end of high school, and I think I'm actually going to do a separate episode about that.

Amena Brown:

So I'll tell y'all about that because it really is a wonderful and sweet story to me. So that was high school. And then before I went to college, I'm not sure, I'm trying to think back. It's like, when I think back on that, I can't remember if I decided before going to college, that I wasn't going to date anyone. I think initially my plan was to try not to date anyone my first year, because in the episode where I was talking you through what it was like for me attending Spelman for undergrad, I felt what I would think is good pressure. That I had a lot of people behind me, supporting me, that I shouldn't just go to college and squander the opportunity. And I felt like I obviously didn't know a lot about dating, I felt like that would be a huge distraction.

Amena Brown:

And so it was my initial goal to not date through the first year. And then I got involved in a campus ministry and all of the other women in the campus ministry were not dating, and they had committed to not dating through college because they were being raised in similar ways to how I was raised. We were being taught at that time, that dating was to get to marrying someone. It wasn't something that you did that could be fun or casual or a way to get to know people, dating had a lot of pressure on it. It was like if you were dating someone, you had to be thinking about do you want to marry this person? Do you want this person to be the other parent to your children? It was a very heavy situation.

Amena Brown:

So I did not date all through college, and then by the time I got into my mid 20s, I had a really hard experience with church. I had started going to a church when I moved here to Atlanta as a first year student at Spelman, and went to that church from being 18 until I was 25. And it was a really tough situation because it was a church that I really loved and I had been going to church there during my really formative years, these years of me being in college and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life and what I felt passionate about, how did my Christian faith apply to my real life. And so there were a lot of things about going to church there that had been really helpful for me. But as I continued going to church there, it was becoming very evident that there was some unhealthy things going on with the leadership there, with the climate of how the church was, and it turned out to be the healthiest thing for me to leave.

Amena Brown:

So at 25, I had a church breakup. I really want to say that might have been my not only first, but only church breakup that I ever had in this manner, where I had to leave a church. I've had churches where it just worked out because I moved or other life transitions, that I left one church to go to another church. But that experience in my 20s was the only time that I was going to a church and chose to leave there because it had become this terribly unhealthy place. And after that church breakup, I decided to stop going to church for a while. And that was really against the advice of a lot of, the people that would've been considered like my elders in a way, that knew that I was leaving the church. They were very like, "Don't be idle too long, go find another church." There was this phrase that many of you that grew up in church may have heard people say, where they'll be like, "You need to go to another church and get planted."

Amena Brown:

And I just wanted to be like, "I'm a human, I don't need to get planted." But what they meant was it could be bad for you if you were out there without a church to go to every Sunday. But what they didn't understand about me at the time, is that I had been involved in local church ministry since I was 13 years old. And not just volunteering every now and then, I had been in leadership in some capacity in church since I was 13, from 13, right up until that church break up at 25, without any breaks. So for me, it wasn't just, oh, I don't want to go to church on Sunday, it was that I had been going to church four times a week. I was probably at church enough that if they had been paying me, that would've been enough hours for at least a part-time job, but I wasn't getting paid anything.

Amena Brown:

And so for me, it was nice to have a break from not having all the meetings that came with volunteering at church, and not having all the leadership responsibilities that I had with all the work I was doing there. And it really was an opportunity for me to find myself, because one of the unhealthy things about the church I was leaving, was that the leadership really didn't feel like you should have a social life outside of the church. It was really being preached to us that if you're single, you should want to be as heavily involved in the church as possible, so that your spouse can, especially ... I should be very specific here, this was being preached to single women. I don't know what was being said to the single men in our church setting.

Amena Brown:

And other friends that did not go to the same church I went to had these experiences at other churches. But they would basically be saying, if you're a single woman, the best thing for you is to be super heavily involved in the church, because if you're looking to get married, that's how, not just not how you're going to find someone, that's how someone's going to find you. You're going to be so heavily involved here that the person God has for you is going to be sent here to this church. And that happened for a few people, but by and large, the majority of us that were single women at that time, that's not at all, for those of us that did get married, that's not at all how we met our spouses and partners, that's not at all how that went.

Amena Brown:

And so I think because there was a lot of that kind of conversation, we really dumped our lives into the church. I didn't really have a lot of friends that I was friends with outside of the church environment. And if any of us had ideas of social life things that we liked to go to, then the church would be like, "Why don't you create that here, make it an environment that we have here, then we can have more control over it, and it can be this Christian environment." And at the time, we really thought we were doing a good thing. And after the whole church breakup thing, I discovered how really isolated I was. So it was this weird sense of feeling disoriented because I didn't have all that time that I was spending at church to anchor me, but it was also this interesting time of having to find own voice and my own wants and needs and desires.

Amena Brown:

And I just took some time away from church for quite a while. And then a part of that meant I gained a social life. I was writing as a freelancer on the music scene of Atlanta at the time, so I went to quite a few music shows and I had reconnected with the poetry scene, I was going back out to open mics and I was going to art gallery openings and just a lot of stuff that I really loved, but never had time to do because I was always at church. So the plus to that was, I was having a lot more fun, I was getting to enjoy my life a lot more. One of the awkward parts about it though, was I was meeting a lot of other people who were in my age group or even a little older, and I was getting outside of my bubble.

Amena Brown:

So I was starting to realize that there were certain things that other people my age had already experienced or already felt comfortable with. And I was super uncomfortable with everything because I mean, simple things like, we were told when we were in leadership at the church I was going to, that we couldn't drink. And then I would meet other writers or meet other artists, and they would invite me out to these happy hours, where we would all hang out together, and I would be the only one there not drinking. And not really because I had made a decision that I just don't like drinking or that drinking's not best from me. I didn't know. I didn't have any drinks when I turned 21. I really didn't end up having my first ever drink until I was actually 27 years old.

Amena Brown:

So it still took me, y'all, a couple of years of hanging out with my new friends and being at happy hour and just drinking a soda, because I didn't know anything about wine, about cocktails, about beer. I was just utterly uncomfortable, even that as a simple example. And then the more we would get to know each other and start talking about who we were attracted to, who we had a crush on, who wanted to date this person, who was single, who was in a relationship, all these things. I was just starting to realize that there was just a lot about life that I didn't know, because no one had ever given me any tools or instructions about that. The only thing I knew about dating was you just want to date and find somebody you marry. But at the same time, we were also being told not to casually date.

Amena Brown:

So I just remember that time of life, realizing that I felt developmentally behind when I was with people that were my same age, that had had very different life experiences than I had being in church all the time. So I didn't, at the time, feel like I needed to just run myself ragged gaining all the experiences that I felt I'd missed, but I did feel like there were some areas I wanted to grow and mature, and I wanted to know myself and what I wanted in those areas of my life. So I'm typically a person that's more risk averse, so I was trying to find some dip my toe in the water ways to begin dating and to not fear casual dating, that it was okay to go to coffee, to go to dinner with someone, just get to know them and that not every interaction I had with a man, had to mean this has to be the husband I marry, the father of my children, all those things.

Amena Brown:

So this guy that I'm writing about in this breakup poem that we're talking about today, I met him during this era of time, where I was going out to these different arts events. And even my sense of fashion y'all, and being able to not being afraid of dressing in a way that was attractive to me, or that was flattering to my figure. All those things were not things that I was encouraged to do in a church environment. So it was really a big learning time, that three years right there for me, that 25 to 28 time.

Amena Brown:

So I met this guy at an arts event and we immediately had this thing where you meet someone and you just click with them. We very immediately had that. And did all of the exchange numbers, I don't know if I would call what we went on a date, but we went to hang out and eat some food. It didn't feel a date to me because I felt like he was investigating what was up with me, and I was definitely feeling a little shy going into it. So I just remember us going to a Moe's and sitting in there and talking, getting to each other, I don't know, y'all maybe it was a date and I just didn't realize it was. And we talked in Moe's till Moe's closed down. And I think from that conversation, we're both with realizing things about each other.

Amena Brown:

I'm realizing that for me, he feels a little bit dangerous because he's someone who grew up in church, who still goes to church, but he didn't have the same relationship to church, and to this very rigid Christian religion, like I had been raised with. So there were a lot of ways that he was sort of like, "Here are the parts of this religion that I take, and here are the parts of this religion that I don't take." And that was a very dangerous feeling, compared to the types of guys that I would've met in church, who, by the way, never asked me to go out on dates, none of them.

Amena Brown:

And then I think he was realizing like, oh, this girl is a real church girl, and I think he was like, "I'm interested in getting to know her, but I'm also feeling a little apprehensive about dating someone that is so new to everything." And so we talked for a little while and surmised that it was probably best, this was more his initiation than mine, but he was like, "I think it's probably best that we just stay friends because I just don't see a girl like you needing to be dating a man like me. I don't know, that doesn't seem like it's going to work out." And so I took him at his word and then we entered the friend zone.

Amena Brown:

But let me tell you, it's different entering the friend zone with someone that you already have this attraction or chemistry to. And I'm a person who loves a When Harry Met Sally or the movie Brown Sugar romance narrative. That has always been something that I have always been really attracted to, which is meeting someone that you become friends with and then totally falling in love with them, because I love the foundation of the friendship, the foundation of you being who you are without thinking about impressing that person. That was not the friendship situation that me and this dude were in. We were in a friendship that was immediately tainted with the fact that we both thought of each other as more than friends, we were just letting each other exist in the friend space, but we did not see each other as homies or anything like that.

Amena Brown:

So we went through some time where he was dating other people, I was dating other people, because we were both artists, we would run into each other at different things and both feel a little salty, seeing the other person be with somebody else. Even though we clearly had made a decision to remain friends, it was still sticky a little bit. It was sort of like seeing him with someone or him seeing me with someone felt like, "What is this person doing here? What are you doing dating them?" But we were refusing at the time to date each other. And we finally arrived at a point where we both were single and weren't in any relationships. And by this time, I've been out here dating a little bit, getting to know myself and figuring out what do I want out of relationships? How do I want to handle that, not just parroting the things that I was taught?

Amena Brown:

And so I felt like, "Look, I'm tired of all of this weird energy between us. If we're both single and "ready to me mingle," why don't we just try dating and not in a bad way, get it over with, but just to me, let's just figure it out. And if it's not meant to be, if we're not supposed to date, then we can really be friends without all of the whatever weird energy this is." Or which was this second part I'm about to say was what my hope was, what young Amena's hope was at the time, "Or we'll discover we're meant for each other. We'll discover this thing should never have been a friendship, that there's a life story in it for us."

Amena Brown:

So he was interested, but a little hesitant, but I think we both were just like, you know what, let's give it a try. So we dated and y'all to be honest thinking about it, it wasn't like I dated this man for two years. I think we only honestly dated a few months. But I'm giving y'all the context about my dating history to tell you that five months feels like forever to a girl that has never been in any exclusive dating relationship. Five months was forever to me. I do not think it felt like that to him because he was more experienced than me in relationships, he was older than me as well. So I am certain that that did not feel as monumental to him as it felt to me, but that few months was everything to me. And I think as I was going through the process of dating him, hanging out with him, this is my first adult exclusive relationship where I had an apartment and he lived in a house.

Amena Brown:

We had residences to go and visit one another and things that we could go do in the city. So all of that was so different from having your little high school boyfriend that you're going to go to Sonic and go to the movies and stand on the porch of your mother's house. So in a way, I realized during the time that I was dating him, that there were so many layers to how I was being raised to think about dating, having been a girl that was growing up in church and growing up in a Christian home that was trying to use the principles that we were learning in church. And so a part of that was, I think we were being implicitly taught to fear our own emotions and to not trust in our feelings or our emotions, to, in a way, see our feelings and emotions as wicked, as things that could totally lead us astray.

Amena Brown:

And listen, I'm not saying your feelings can't lead you astray, but that threw out the good stuff with the bathwater, because that throughout no one's saying to us that it can be a beautiful experience to fall in love with someone. No adult ever said that to me or in front of me. As a high schooler, I was being taught that basically to fall in was super dangerous. Because basically you fall in love, you have sex, you get pregnant, you get a STD and then now you're the central character of some Christian Church skit. It all just got so strange. And I feared feeling those feelings for someone, I feared that those feelings would just run away with me, instead of me being able to see that those feelings are a beautiful part of being human, that you can fall in love with someone.

Amena Brown:

And we would also hear these statements when we would talk about, hear people, hear adults talking about marriage, when I was growing up. And there were times that they joked about marriage and particularly sex and marriage being fun and things like that. But I feel like for the most part, a lot of what I heard about being married in church, really was boiling down to the fact that love wasn't a feeling, that love was a decision that you had to make every day. And on a level, I get that because myself now having been in a 10 year plus now marriage to my own husband, who is not thankfully the man that I was writing about it in this, the young Amena was writing about in this poem, I hadn't even met him yet. But I can understand that sentiment of this idea, that to decide to spend your life with someone as a spouse, as a life partner is not the skipping through the roses feeling every day, I can understand that.

Amena Brown:

But in a way it was almost like they erred on the side of telling us that, without also being able to share with us that it's a gorgeous feeling to fall in love, it's beautiful. And even in a marriage, even in a life partnership with someone that you've been with years and years, you can still have those feelings of flutter sometimes, that that's a beautiful part of being human, that that does not make the experience any less righteous or any less holy in this way. So I was finding myself falling in love with this man over these few months that we dated. And I almost feel like it was hard for me to let myself fall in love with him fully or really truly, probably admit to myself that I was falling in love with him. And the scene at the beginning of this poem is very accurate to what happened.

Amena Brown:

He had been out of town and came back in town. He had been out of town and had not been as communicative. And one thing I learned about myself in my dating history in general, before I married my husband, is that I really can't be with a man who can't communicate with me. I really, really can't. That's top, top, that was top, top of the list, of my dating list before I met my husband. Because I can take you going through things, you struggling with this or that, but dating someone that can, at times, fall off the face of the earth a little bit and just go away for periods of time and you don't know, "Hey, I'm just going to take some time to myself." You don't know anything. And so he was starting to have some moments like that, that were giving me the clue that something was up with him, and that I felt that that was very much connected to his thoughts about this relationship.

Amena Brown:

And one of the things, and I wrote about this extensively in my book, How to Fix a Broken Record, so I won't go into huge amounts of detail here. But I think one of the things that was interesting at the time, was yes, I had grown up in church, which means I had grown up with the idea that sex should be reserved for marriage. Well, then I went through this church breakup, so I had these years where I wasn't going to church, I wasn't heavily involved in church ministry and activities like I had been. So I was really having to evaluate the choices that I was making to say to myself, is this a choice I make because it's the only thing I know, because it's what I was told, or am I making that choice because that's what I really want to do. And I realized while dating this man that even though yes, it had been preached to me that I should wait until I get married to have sex.

Amena Brown:

And I grew up in the era of, I kissed dating goodbye, and True Love Waits and all those things, I realized while I was dating him that I actually wanted to wait, that at the very least I could say in this experience with him, that I wasn't ready to have sex. And that was hard for 20 something me to admit, because I had felt so naive compared to my peers. But I just realized, even though I'm in love with this man, even though I might lose this relationship because I'm just not ready, I'm just not ready. And all of the things I would do to try to push myself to be ready, just did not feel like the right thing for me. And to his credit, he understood that, and he was really patient with that, but he was all also, in this way, he was very direct with me, to say, "I have never been in a relationship with someone where sex was not a part of that relationship. And I don't know that that's feasible for me."

Amena Brown:

And in his time being distant from me, I think he was trying to contemplate that. And so we were both at this strange crossroads where I was like, "I'm not ready," and he was, "I've been ready, and I think it's better for this relationship to not have disastrous ending, for me to walk away now because I can't sustain this relationship. I want to respect that you're not ready, and the best way for me to respect that is to break up with you." So it was such a weird feeling to finally allow myself to get past my fear of falling in love with a man, and saying it to y'all sounds strange, it sounds strange to think that falling in love with a man was a thing that I feared, but it was because the way I was raised, there was a lot of danger connected to that act. And I finally let myself fall in love with him, which is just such a beautiful thing, and then to realize we both have differing thoughts on this and this is not going to work out.

Amena Brown:

So to have my first time falling in love as an adult woman, and then to have my first breakup, felt very vicious in my 20 something self. And I didn't have any concept of how you deal with that because I didn't have a high school boyfriend that I went out on dates with and experienced that breakup at 17. Here I was 28 years old, 10 years post when most of my friends were having their first breakup. And I am just ... I think I'm heartbroken over it because it's new, it's a new experience. I don't know anything about it, but also because I was being raised to think that every dating experience should end in marriage, I really didn't have an alternate version of that story. I didn't have the alternate version that you could date someone and you could love them, they could love you, and y'all could have various sundry reasons why you break up and now to deal with that heartbreak.

Amena Brown:

But I think we were being taught in a way, under the ideas of I kissed dating goodbye, was this idea that heartbreak was a thing to avoid. And of course, nobody wants their heart to be broken, but heartbreak is unfortunately a part of our human condition. It's a thing that across language, across generation, across race and culture, it's a thing we share as human beings. We all know it, however it entered our lives. And it's not necessarily something that has to be this big thing of danger, as a human, if you work hard to avoid all heartbreak, you're going to avoid some other things too. You're going to end up avoiding possibly getting a chance to get closer to people, getting a chance to actually fully live your life.

Amena Brown:

So that heartbreak was tough, yo, a breakup hurts in a way that if you've never experienced it yourself, it's really difficult for anyone to describe it to you. I felt like eating everything and eating nothing, all at the same time. It sometimes felt like my body physically actually hurt, that that's how much my heart was broken. That this whole thing that had been great to me in certain regards, was just over. And that moment where, when you've been dating someone and you're talking to them all the time, you're hanging out with them all the time, and then you go through that breakup. And I remember one time I text him after the breakup, something had come up that I don't know if I ever thought it was funny or made me think about him, and I messaged him.

Amena Brown:

And when you're dating someone, you're used to getting the immediate text back and long text exchanges and all that. I remember a while went by and then after whatever I said, he said something really short and that was all. And it felt curt in comparison to what our previous communications had been like. And all of that rocks your world after a breakup, it be hard. I remember I asked one of my friends like, "How long is this going to hurt me?" And she was like, "Oh, it could be a few months, it could be a year." And I was like, "A year?" I was hoping a few weeks I would feel better, and it just takes a lot of time healing from a relationship ending. And in my case, this was not a very long relationship, but because of my history, it was very loaded, it was a lot more to me than just a few months.

Amena Brown:

So normally I would talk about here what was the real life story behind performing the poem for the first time. And truthfully, I think I've only done this poem in public one or two times, y'all, I don't think. Number one, because he and I had mutual friends and we knew each other on the local artist scene here in Atlanta, I was very hesitant to just go to any open mic event and read this because I didn't know he'd be there, I didn't know if friends, mutual friends of ours would be there, that would know that I was talking about him, even if he wasn't there.

Amena Brown:

So I think the times that I've ever read this poem in public, they were all out of town. And many of you know, because I've talked about it a lot here on the podcast, that in the previous iteration of my career, outside of the last few years now, I was working primarily in a lot of Christian spaces, mostly white, very conservative spaces. But every now and then, especially at colleges or sometimes at youth events, I would get these long sets of time to perform, or my husband and I would perform together.

Amena Brown:

And we would get hour sets, hour and 15 minutes, sometimes 90 minute sets that we would get a chance to do. And every now and then I would love to bring out love poems, and every now and then I bring out this breakup poem in these environments, and this is the reason why. I felt like in the narrative that I was being taught, and because I was going to a lot of churches, I knew that it wasn't just how I grew up, that a lot of kids in church were still growing up with this same narrative, that basically the best life for you to have was you should get married, have no dating history, have no sexual history. That the only thing you know about falling in love is to your spouse.

Amena Brown:

And some people had that experience, and for some people that experience was good for them. I think the danger in it is that that wasn't going to be the narrative for most of us. And I also think the danger in it was villainizing the idea of being a human that has history, that has people you dated before, that has people you had sex with, that has people maybe you were married to before, that that's a part of being an adult human, that you're going to come into different times of your life with your own story, with your history. Some of your history will be super great, some of it'll be terrible and hard and painful and traumatic, but that's a part of it. And I think in a way, for those of us who had history in various ways, then it was like when we would hear that preach to us, well, if I do have history, what does that mean?

Amena Brown:

That means there's no love for me in this life, that means I won't be able to be in blah, blah, blah, types of relationship that I want to be in. And so I decided, here we are going into these very conservative spaces and we are being invited in for a day or two, and then we're going to go home. So that means we can get away with saying some things on stage that the people who work with these kids or these college students, or these single people all the time are going to get in way more trouble for saying. The most that will happen to me is that they'll decide they didn't like what I said, they won't invite me back. And so sometimes I would read to the kids, love poems that I'd written about my husband, because I didn't get a chance to hear a lot growing up, of what it sounds like to love someone intimately, what it sounds like to be in love.

Amena Brown:

And I thought it's important for kids, especially in those environments, to hear that, to know that that's okay, that that's beautiful. And every now and then I would break out this poem and read it because I think too, when you're a teenager and sometimes in college as well, you are going through your own times of having crushes, of falling in love, of having your heart broken by the person that you had a crush on. And then if you're in church environments, a lot of adults are still trying to separate their history as if it's bad to be a person that has history. And so they can't or don't always say to you, "Hey, I know you had a crush on that person and your heart is totally broken now because blah, blah, blah happened. But I remember having a crush before too, and I remember being in love before too."

Amena Brown:

And I started saying to the kids, when we would be in those environments, "You might fall in love many times in your life," because I wanted them to know that. I am married to a man that I love, I love him. I actually like him still as a person, after being married to him 10 years and being to together over 11 years now, I still really like him a lot. And it's not bad that we both had other people in our lives that we loved before, it doesn't mean that that's bad. It may have actually added some layers to who we are now, that we had those experiences. So I always thought that that was important, and I think the small amount of times I've ever read this poem in public was probably an environment like that.

Amena Brown:

How do I feel about the poem today? I have talked to y'all, I think, about this on a few episodes, that in my process of writing poetry, I am not a poet that writes a lot out of catharsis. I don't write a lot out of, I was angry, I was sad, these emotions that in this last probably 10 to 15 years of my writing life, in my professional writing life, those things are not what has drawn me to the page. It's a lot more of, sometimes it's things I've experienced in my life, sometimes it's things I wonder about and I want to explore the question in a poem, but that doesn't mean that I don't write poems out of my feelings. It's just true that a lot of the poems I have written out of my feelings, they never see the light of day to the public.

Amena Brown:

Sometimes I write them to people, I have written many poems to my husband that are only for my husband's eyes, that I never intend to publish any place for anyone to see, except for him. I've written a couple of poems for other people that are just for them, and I don't intend for those to be in the public. And I've written some poems for myself that were this sense of needing to go into the poem and work out the feelings and emotions. And this poem was one of those, and it wasn't something I wrote thinking that I would ever share it publicly. But then I looked back on it and thought, man, I'm glad Amena at whatever age I was writing this, 28 or whatever I was, I'm glad I wrote that because as soon as I went to read it in preparing this episode to share with y'all, it was like I could remember what that first apartment looked like.

Amena Brown:

I can remember how it felt to realize I was in love with someone and to also realize I was in love with someone that I was not going to continue having this relationship with. I can remember how visceral that heartbreak felt. And I'm so glad that previous me wrote that out so that me at whatever stage of life I'm in, can look back on that and always have this time capsule of myself. I think that's the powerful thing about writing, whether you write as a professional or not, even the things that we journal or write in our note app on our phones or whatever, all of those things are these capsules for us to be able to speak back to ourselves in these powerful ways.

Amena Brown:

And I'll tell you this one last story. The pastor of the church that I was growing up in, the church I grew up in was pastored by a couple. And I went to a women's retreat in my 20s with my mom, we went back to the women's retreat of this church where I had grown up. And it was a really wonderful experience, I grew up in an all Black church. So imagine that we are at this very fancy retreat place in Austin and we were all just out, hanging out by the pool, all generations of Black women that went to this church I grew up in. And I was sitting by the pool, dangling my feet in the pool, just having chill conversation with other church women. And it's one of my most beautiful memories because we were just all talking about life and about men and dating and all these things that in a normal church setting, I wouldn't get a chance to hear from these elder women.

Amena Brown:

And later on, my pastor had asked me, she wanted to know how I was doing, and sometimes she would ask me what I was reading. And she asked me was anything going on exciting in my life right now. And I had a crush on a boy and I started to tell her, and of course I had a big crush on him. I was probably in my mid 20s at this point. And I'm smiling and telling her and she said, "You know what, enjoy it." She said, "It's a beautiful feeling." She said, "Everyone should have that feeling at least once in their life." And that was vindicating for me, having grown up hearing so much danger about dating and emotions and feelings. And to hear this woman who had pastored all of us, encouraged me to enjoy those feelings, and those moments, was such a beautiful memory for me.

Amena Brown:

So I hope as you have listened to this, and maybe you're eating your discounted Valentine's Day candy, I hope that it encourages you to give grace to whatever your history is, as it relates to love and dating and sex and all the things that go into our romantic and sexual lives. I hope that you can give your previous self a lot of grace for all the things that your previous self was learning at the time. And I hope that you can see the beauty in your history, even in the hard things that took place there and who it made you to be. And I hope above all things, that you always have a lot of love for yourself because you going to be with you, you going to fall in love maybe, with a lot of people in your life, but you only have one you, so make sure you give a lot of love to that you, I'll see y'all next week.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 63

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown, and today we are going behind the poetry. I thought it would be good, we haven't gone behind the poetry in a minute. So I was looking through the list of poems that I had that are possible pieces to take you behind the poetry on, and today I wanted to talk about my poem First Lines. So as always, I want you to listen to a recording of this piece, and the recording that you're about to hear is the version of First Lines that I recorded from my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live. Check it out.

Amena Brown:

First lines never care what time it is. They nudge their cold noses against my ear wanting to go for walks in the briskest part of the AM. They don't care that I just went to sleep, that I'm lazy, that I no longer take to the habit of keeping a journal by the bed for this very moment that I want to shoo them away. I'm too afraid of losing one, so I drag my right hand out from under the covers, grab the pen that has long since riddled my bedspread with ink spots and let the poem do its business so we can both head back to sleep.

Amena Brown:

Some days I want to quit, afraid that the words I write, or maybe even my own life, this will never be good enough but thankfully words don't give up, they are ants crawling in a line sending out one at a time to scout out the territory. I mean, they bring reinforcements, long lines of stanzas, tracing a trail around my floorboards, up and then down the door jamb, surrounding the perimeter of my walls, will not be stomped or stopped until they find the sweet thing they've been searching for.

Amena Brown:

So despite the decline of printing presses or the fact that magazines, books and newspapers have become an endangered species, or that words have historically been misused and taken advantage of, words will never grow extinct, they will not be rationed or put on government assistance. Words know no economic crisis, and their stimulus plan can be found in my grandmother's Scrabble tiles, searching for triple word score or in the hands of a little colored girl clutching the spine of For Colored Girls, hoping to find the backbone to be herself in a world that would encourage her to be anything but. So as long as God is still speaking, as long as the story must be told, as long as the words that are inside your heart will always show up on your tongue, as long as a whisper still has the power to send the hairs at the back of your neck to rise in standing ovation, words will survive.

Amena Brown:

They are really just like the rest of us, searching for a place called home where strong arms and a warm heart to told them, for someone to accept them in their present tense, to believe they can become something. Which is why, after a long day and an even longer list of things left to do, I leave my worries outside this room, I lay down next to these words, I wrap my arms around them until I can feel them breathing and sometimes in the middle of the night, we wake up just to share each other's secrets. Then after we have both fallen asleep, the pen slips from my fingers and leaves its mark on the page.

Amena Brown:

Oh, this poem is so tender. I actually feel like most of the poems that I write now all fall in the category of tender, but in the era of time that I was writing First Lines, I was not writing as many tender poems. It was like every now and then a tender poem would come out, and so I feel special feelings listening back to the piece now. What made me write the poem is, I really have to give a special shout-out to my friend and wonderful and amazing poet, Gypsee Yo. She wrote a poem called Why a Poem Has to Wait, and the link to a YouTube video of Gypsee Yo's performance of this piece will be in the show notes, so make sure you check it out because Gypsee Yo is fricking amazing. She's amazing, internationally renowned poet.

Amena Brown:

In Gypsee's poem, Why a Poem Has to Wait, and maybe I should give you a little bit of the era of this time that she was writing this, that I then was writing First Lines, I met Gypsee Yo on Atlanta's poetry scene. Gypsee Yo is a fantastic spoken word poet, at that time she was also a slam poet, and if you're not familiar with slam, slam is the competitive side of spoken word poetry and Gypsee Yo was a formidable competitor. So she was doing slam poetry, I had done some slam and I think around the time that I was writing First Lines, I was just starting to edge my way out of slam poetry and just focus most on being a spoken word poet. I didn't really feel cut out for the competitive parts.

Amena Brown:

But Gypsee Yo and I were not just poets on the same scene, but we were wonderful friends and she's still someone I consider a friend to this day. At the time of her writing Why a Poem Has to Wait, if I'm remembering right, she had just had her daughter and in the poem she's talking about all these things that creep in, in life, all these responsibilities and different things she had going on. She's got to feed her baby, she's got to take the trash out and take care of different things around the house, and all those things become reasons why a poem has to wait, why a poem can't immediately be written when the idea initially comes to her.

Amena Brown:

At the time that she was writing this, and also experiencing motherhood and her marriage with her husband and everything, I was single, I don't have any kids, so didn't have any kids then, and I listened to this poem and it's a dope poem, it's an amazing piece, and it really speaks to me still in a lot of ways about those of us that do creative work and feel that creative work calling to us, and sometimes our responsibilities in life, our obligations are things that are a priority, that have to take priority above our creative work in some ways, start eating away at that time. We're just doing the best we can to try and give some attention to our creative work when we can, while also trying to take care of these other pressing things in our lives.

Amena Brown:

But it also gave me a moment of reflection, as far as in my creative process, do I feel like I'm at a season of life where the poems feel like they have to wait? I didn't feel that way at the time. At the time, I felt like my poems were nagging me all the time. I thought to myself, "What would it be like if I were to write my version of this idea that Gypsee Yo put together in her poem, Why a Poem Has to Wait?" I was like, "My idea would be like why my poems don't wait." That was really the beginning idea for First Lines. What was the real life story behind writing the poem or behind some of the things written in the poem?

Amena Brown:

Well, if I remember right, at the time that I was writing First Lines, I was living alone in my first apartment ever, I can still close my eyes and just see that little place. I was so, so proud of it. My first apartment, I moved into it when I was 27 and I was working in corporate America at the time and I had been living with some really good friends of mine, a couple that are really, they're friends, but they're like family to me, and I had been really living with them since I graduated from college. So I'd been living with them for five years and they were moving, and so it was this moment where we were all separating, going our own way. Even though I had been grown and working a job and all that, it was like that apartment was my first time where I was going to be responsible for all of the bills.

Amena Brown:

Those of you that live here in Atlanta, my first apartment was in an area of town called Vinings. It was a very cute area, kind of like a suburb, but not so far into the suburbs that you're super far from the city. I remember the apartment, when I first went to see it, had faux granite countertops and you couldn't tell me nothing that I had that faux granite, okay? I also remember that I was working in corporate, but I had a feeling that I was not going to stay working in corporate long. So I had a choice, where my job was, was in Sandy Springs, which is a bit outside of Atlanta and even more deep into the suburbs. So I was looking at apartments there and looking at apartments in Vinings, and the apartments there were super-duper nice, all these amenities and everything like this.

Amena Brown:

Then the apartments that were more in Vinings or more close to town, I was able to find some apartments that were a bit cheaper, a little further away from work, but a little closer into the city. I was still doing some journalism work and stuff like that where I was outside of work covering music events and different things like that. I think I have talked to you all about, maybe I haven't, but I probably actually may need to do a separate episode about this, but briefly I had a mentor for a brief time and his name was Greg Tate. Greg Tate actually passed away recently and so he's been on my mind a lot, and other people have been posting about him because Greg Tate is one of the pioneering hip-hop culture journalists.

Amena Brown:

He was a writing for the Village Voice and just a very well known voice and leader and writer. He was a mentor of mine for a while and one of the last times that I saw him in New York, he had said to me, he was encouraging me to move to New York, and he had said something to me about New York that I actually took to heart even in Atlanta. He had said to me, "When you pick a place to live, pick a place to live that's near where you like to kick it, that's near your friends, that's near the restaurants you love, that's near your bar, your coffee shop, your stuff like that." He was like, "You can commute to work, but you don't want to have to feel like you're commuting to the things that you do for fun."

Amena Brown:

So in his advice, he was telling me, "When you move to New York, pick the borough or the area of the borough where you're going to live, pick the borough that's near some friends of yours, that's near the spots you like to live. Take the train into Manhattan or whatever to go to work." He was like, "If you want to live in Harlem, you want to live in Brooklyn, do that. Live near where the fun is for you." Even though I never moved to New York, I thought about that a lot as it related to Atlanta. So I had that choice at the time, I could move into my first apartment, live 10 minutes from where my job is, live in this really, really nice expensive apartment, and I felt if I picked that apartment, I was choosing a life. I was choosing a life that meant I was going to have to stay at that corporate job longer because I knew if I decided to leave that job and go into writing and being artist full-time, what if I couldn't afford the rent on that side of town?

Amena Brown:

So I chose my first little apartment, believe it or not the rent was $775 for a one bedroom, one bath. This is almost, wait, I was about to say it's almost 15 years ago, but it's not, it's literally 15 years ago that I was moving into this apartment. They had two units available, they had one unit available that would have been more expensive that had a washer and dryer in it, and I didn't own a washer and dryer at the time, and they had one unit that didn't even have the plugs for a washer and dryer. So they were offering discounted rent, so I think the rent would have been more, but they knocked it down to $775 because there was no way that you could use a washer and dryer in there. I was like, "Yes, yes. I'll take it."

Amena Brown:

So I took it, moved into my first little apartment and figured, "Hey, I'm going to be on the hustle." It was true, within the year that I moved into that apartment, I did quit my job and was glad, even though I had to move out of there, because going full-time I still couldn't afford $775 worth of rent, but I was glad for the months I had having that rent versus the way higher rent I would have had in another apartment. Living by myself and just having the bed all to myself and everything, I typically read books before I went to bed, sometimes I wrote in bed and I have always been a sleeper that pretty much sleeps on the same side of the bed, even though I never really shared a bed with anyone until I married my husband.

Amena Brown:

So I always slept on one side of the bed and on the other side of the bed there were typically journals, books I was reading, different little notebooks that had poems in them or pieces of poems. So this idea that's in First Lines of me laying there and the poems being like a pet or a dog that needs to go for a walk in the morning, and me picking up the pen and actually writing in bed was actually true to my life. Not as much anymore, because it's a husband, it's a husband on the other side of the bed. So now, my version of First Lines would be very different, but at this time that was still really true of my life. That I just would go to bed sometimes and have ideas for poems, I would wake up sometimes with ideas for poems, and I had a one-bedroom, so I didn't have an office.

Amena Brown:

My friend, my assistant Leigh and I were talking about this recently that my dinette table that my grandmother helped me buy, it's a much longer story to go with this, but I was trying to date this man when I moved into this apartment and he had done a favor for me and so as repayment for that favor, I had agreed to make dinner for him. But at the time that I told him yes, I would make dinner for him, I didn't have a table. My grandma is notorious, she just does this with her grandchildren, probably her children too, but I see it even more so with her grandchildren where if she sees that you need something, she's just ready to take you and buy it for you. She's like, "It's cold, your coat is raggedy and you haven't bought a new coat since blah-blah-blah-blah." She's going to take you to the mall right away.

Amena Brown:

So she knew that I had moved into this apartment, she was ready for me to go ahead and buy a little dinette set, a table that would have four chairs, just the right size for my little apartment. But with my grandma, and maybe this is oldest kid stuff, I am the second oldest grandchild, I am the oldest girl grandchild in my family, so I didn't like the idea of my grandma taking me and just buying the whole thing. I was like, "I'm working a good job." So she agreed that we could go half on it, so she bought me this dark espresso wood table, actually there's not a technical way to call, called espresso wood, but it's wood that's colored in what was considered to be an espresso color, dark brown wood with the chairs and everything.

Amena Brown:

It was between my bed and that table that my grandma helped me get so I could make dinner for this man, and then subsequently go through all sorts of wonderful experiences, as well as heartbreak with him. But other than that, my main memory of that table is that I didn't have an office, I didn't have this official place to sit down and write, and so that table became my desk, my work area where all of the poems and papers would be scattered about. So it was that area and it was that place on my bed with all the books and everything, those were really my main two areas where I wrote.

Amena Brown:

To this day, in the house I currently live in now, what was my original dinette table in my first apartment is now my desk in my office. My husband and I were just talking yesterday about this, because we need to get a new dining room table, but we want a smaller one because the area where our dining room table is, is not very large. So ironically, my original little dinette table would probably fit perfectly in our dining room area, but that would mean I'd have to get a new desk and I'm just not emotionally sure if I'm ready to get an actual desk that's probably better for me ergonomically, but I just have a lot of emotion and sentiment around that table and the amount of times in my life I sat at that table to write. It feels like that table has my writer juju, and I just don't know if another desk will have that. I don't know if you all that are writers or do creative work that way have sentimentality about some of the things ...

Amena Brown:

So that's the beginning parts of this piece, this idea of the picking up my hand out from under the covers, the bedspread riddled with ink blots is also true and accurate. I think I still, I got rid of, I only have one left, I had two bedspreads that I'd had for years, I have one left that I just, I don't know, it's like I'm Linus. Is Linus the one that holds the blanket of the Charlie Brown characters? If it's Linus, then I'm him about my blanket. I still have a comforter that was on my bed when I was like 13 years old, and I still curl up with it on the couch all the time. It's one of those blankets that's not for guests, the only person outside of my husband that uses it and I don't feel some type of way is my sister when she comes over, she'll use it. But if just regular guests are over, that blanket is folded up somewhere, it's not for anybody.

Amena Brown:

But that blanket and the other comforter that I used to have when I was in college all had ink spots on them. Every comforter that I had until I married my husband and we bought new bedding, all had ink spots on it because I would write in bed and then sometimes I would fall asleep, and I always write with rollerball pens, so I would forget and fall asleep or fold up the pen in a book or a journal, and then as I'm rolling over, the pen would slip out or the book or journal would get folded over and I would wake up and big ink spots on the bed. So that is an accuracy that was in my life for a long time, until I married my husband.

Amena Brown:

I also really appreciate about this poem the honesty that there are some days as a writer that I want to quit. I have to really think about that statement, because when I say that, it's not literally for me like there are days that I'm just like, "I'm going to give this up and I'm going to move on." But there are days where I question if it's worth it to continue writing. I think every writer would say that they have this moment sometimes. I love the vulnerability of saying that here, and that as a writer, sometimes you do want to quit, you do want to give up on yourself, but it has been my experience that the words don't give up. That even when I think I am not a good writer, I'm berating myself or being mean to myself in certain ways, or even in the times that I worry that the words won't come back.

Amena Brown:

That's happened a lot for me as a writer, where I'll go through a time that I feel really prolific and then I'll go through this quiet almost fallow time, and during that time, I always question, "Was that it? Was that the last time that the words are going to show up?" And it never is. The words always show up, they always come back. I'm a person who actually really, really dislikes ants, ants almost freak me out more than one big bug, because I'm like, "You could kill one big bug, even if you had to use a bow and arrow or a big rifle or something, you could kill one big bug. But what are you going to do about 600 ants?"

Amena Brown:

So it's fascinating to me that ants are in this poem, but they're the perfect example of how ants also don't give up and they work as a team, there's always more than one of them. You might see one, but if you see one, that means there's 1000 of them somewhere else. I loved that visual of the words being like ants, and just doing all of the crawling and organizing of themselves to get back to you as the writer.

Amena Brown:

This other section here talking about, no matter what happens to the mechanisms that we think are supposed to carry the words. At the time that I was writing this, 15 years ago, there was all this conversation about what was going to happen to our newspapers and people were starting to want to read less and less, and not as much wanting to read long form literature, only wanting to read short form literature, wanting to read blogs more than they were reading books. What would that mean for our magazines, for our newspapers, all these things? Of course, it's interesting that as things were becoming digitized, a lot of people feared what will that mean for writers and what will that mean for readers?

Amena Brown:

But in truth, looking back on it, we may have created other accessibility for folks that there are these options now of audiobooks that are more accessible, that the audiobooks don't have to be on tape or on CD or whatever, there are the Kindle, the Nook, the eReader type of vibes, and now even on our smartphones. I'm not even sure at the time I was writing this poem that you could have read a book on your smartphone at that time. So it's an interesting idea that there was this fearful talk around this and that now we know, post this poem being written, that there are all these ways that words are accessible to us. Even some people feared when Twitter became very popular like, "Ugh, this is ruining folks' attention spans."

Amena Brown:

Maybe in certain ways it did or it is, but there are other ways that books and stories are even more accessible to people, it's just the form of that is different. I loved this idea that words know no economic crisis, that our ability to write or read or story-tell in whatever form we do isn't controlled by capitalism, it isn't controlled by what the economy is doing, that the stories will always get told is a hope for the writer and hope for the reader too. These few lines right here are probably my favorite lines of this poem, "Words know no economic crisis, their stimulus plan can be found in my grandmother's Scrabble tiles, searching for triple word score or in the hands of a little colored girl clutching the spine of For Colored Girls, hoping to find the backbone to be herself in a world that would encourage her to be anything but."

Amena Brown:

That's probably one of my favorite sections of a poem that I've written, because this grounding visual, my grandma is a Scrabble player to the end, to the end, my grandma's a Scrabble player. I was thinking in writing this piece, what were some things in my life that caused me to be a person that values words or felt that words were important? My grandmother playing Scrabble is a part of that, that words are important to my grandmother, that even to this day, if we're having a conversation with my grandma and we say a word that she's not familiar with, she'll ask us, "Say it again to me, spell it." Then she'll go in her physical dictionary sometimes and look up what those words mean, or if she plays someone else in Scrabble and they play a word and she doesn't know it, she'll look up what it means.

Amena Brown:

I love that about her that even at almost 90 years old, there's still this openness with her to still want to learn things. So this idea that the survival of words, it's found in my grandma playing Scrabble, it's found in me having been a little girl that was reading a book like Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, and I loved that idea that when we read, here we are holding, for those of us that are reading the actual physical books, you're holding the book that has a spine. This idea that me holding the spine of a book by Ntozake Shange also would help me to find the backbone to be who I am in the world, and that being a writer is about the power of your own words, it is about the power of your own story, but I do believe that in order to be a good writer, you have to be a reader too, which means you have the experience also of what the power of what someone else has written can do for you

Amena Brown:

As I'm getting to the end of this poem, taking the listener and the reader back to this bedroom scene that the day is over and I get in bed, and at this time I was literally getting in bed with my books, I was laying in the bed next to books and journals, and that sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea or write something down, and then having this concept of personifying the words, the books, et cetera, and having it be this conversation between me and the journal or me and the book and the pen slipping from my fingers, leaving its mark on the page. I love that. Very tender poem this is. What is the real life story behind performing this poem for the first time?

Amena Brown:

I can not remember actually the first time that I performed this poem, but I will tell you this poem ended up on my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live, and I don't mean my last as I'm never going to record any more, I hope to record more albums, but the last one that I did came out in 2016. I did not remember until working on this episode that First Lines was actually on that album, and I'm so proud of Amena Brown Live as an album, it's still available out there wherever you listen to music, but Amena Brown Live was so important to me because, many of you know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, I spent many years of my career working in White Christian conservative spaces. I also, as a subset of that, spent many years as a poet writing what would be considered in that space to be worship poetry or poetry that was only about God, it was not about your life, your experiences, your breakups, falling in love or anything like that, it was supposed to be something that was either written to God or about God and that was it.

Amena Brown:

So I have quite a few albums that are like that. For me, Amena Brown Live was the first album that I recorded that I really focused on truly being myself, doing the pieces I really wanted to do, and a lot of the pieces that are on Amena Brown Live were pieces that I sometimes was not able to do in some of the church settings where I was performing at the time, because they were pieces about life, they were pieces about storytelling, they didn't go between these two worship songs. But still to this day, I am so, so proud of Amena Brown Live because it is probably the best representation of what it is like to see me live. Of all the things that are out there, it's probably the closest to.

Amena Brown:

If you were wondering, "What's it like to see her live?" That album is closest to it. So I love that First Lines was a part of that, because First Lines is a poem that typically if I, and I'm rarely doing events now, a lot of people are rarely doing events because of the pandemic, but even for me, I'm not doing even a lot of virtual events and stuff like that, but when I have done virtual events in this last couple of years and I have to do a 15-minute set, a 30-minute set, First Lines is not typically one of the poems that goes in that set. It's very rare that I actually bring out First Lines and perform it, but it felt right that night to do it.

Amena Brown:

My favorite place to do First Lines is at an open mic or at a room where there are poets and writers there, because it's a writer's poem, it's a poet's poem to talk about that creative process. So that's my memory of performing this piece, and when I do get back to performing and sharing more, it is one that I hope to bring out of the woodwork a little bit more. How do I feel about this poem today? I still love this poem, I still love this poem. I still love how it, I hope, brings hope to folks who are doing creative work, that sometimes the creative work nags you, sometimes it is like what Gypsee Yo talked about in her poem, sometimes you have so much life and other things you have to get done that the creative work has to wait. That's also hard for us, as creative folks.

Amena Brown:

I also love about this poem that it's saying it's okay, that sometimes in your creative work you feel like giving up or you feel like you might quit, even though maybe you know deep inside you'll never quit, but your emotions just feel like, "Forget this." Push back from the table and never come back. Or you worry that it's not you that wants to quit, but what if your ability to be inspired, your ability to write new or fresh things, what if it doesn't come back to you? All those things, I hope this poem is hope for folks who do creative work to say that creativity's always there, the inspiration is always there no matter how much life may happen to us that may keep us from the work, no matter how much we may have been beaten down by the business aspects of the work that we do, that the inspiration is truly there, is always waiting, is ready for you to take it out on a walk in the morning, is waiting between all of the errands and chores and stuff that you're doing during the day.

Amena Brown:

It makes me think of another poem that I won't do in full, but I wrote another poem called, I think it was A Letter to the MC. I'm going to see if I can find it real quick, because it has a little section in it that I want to read to you as a close of our episode today. But when I was working on this piece, I was just thinking about how a lot of times when we talk about writing and creative work and things like that, we're always talking about the perfect scenario. That the perfect scenario for you to be writing, we've heard people ad nauseam say, "The perfect scenario for you as a writer is for you to have your ..." What's the word I want to use? Your cabin and all of this perfect scenario, and who has that really? No one. No one has that.

Amena Brown:

Nobody has, unless you are really super, super rich and privileged, which is a very tiny percentage of people, most people and most even other writers that we love, they were also juggling their real lives. They had jobs, a lot of them weren't full-time writers, they had families or they had family members that they had to take care of and these types of things. I want to propagate more the reality and the idea that you can be a writer and be a creative person and have all the things that are going on in your regular life, and maybe you don't have time to write a poem every day or paint a new thing every day, but it doesn't mean that all that life you're living is not showing up in the art somewhere.

Amena Brown:

So I'm going to read this little bit of a section where I was writing to the MCs, the rappers that I love, but I think this applies to writers overall. What I like, what I want to see you do is stand on the corner in your own hood, shove one hand into the pocket of your hoodie, place one hand on your chest, pull that hood over your head and ears and listen to your heart. Listen to the streets you come from, tell me a story I've never heard, tell me a story I've heard 1000 times and help me see it through new eyes.

Amena Brown:

Break out your spiral notebooks, scrawl, scribble, write until your hand cramps up, until the sun comes up, until your lunch break is over, until your boss catches you, until all the words in your head rest so you can catch shut-eye for a few hours and wake up and do it all again. Rhyme while you restock the shelves at the store, after you put the kids to bed, while your math teachers lectures equations. Un-spool the lines wound in your head, hold them in your mouth until you can give them a place to play. That's First Lines, you all. Thanks for joining me.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 62

Amena Brown:

That time I met India Arie. That time I went on a really bad date. That time I was directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got mono on Thanksgiving. That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour. That time I... Hey, you all. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. I'm Amena Brown. It is winter of 2022, the beginning of 2022. I hope you all are staying warm. I hope you are taking care of yourselves and being as gentle with yourself as possible right now. I think that is so, so important so don't forget. Be gentle with yourself. As you can, be gentle with other people too, right? I'm taking you all back for this That Time I episode. I've been thinking a lot about location and place and how the places that we have literally physically been, the places that we're from, how they play a role in who we become.

Amena Brown:

I've been thinking a lot about my journey to moving here to Atlanta, which is where home is for me. I've been here in Atlanta since '98. I have some other episodes that I'll be doing as the year progresses to talk about my journey here in the city and the ways that I feel Atlanta has really built me as an artist. Also, my dating history. There'll just be quite a few things to discuss as it relates to the city of Atlanta. But I could not start on talking to you about my journey to moving to Atlanta and making Atlanta home without starting with what brought me here, which was getting into Spelman College. This is a That Time I went to Spelman episode. For those of you that are not aware, I really hope that you're aware as you're listening to this.

Amena Brown:

But for those of you who aren't aware, Spelman College is a historically Black college and it is one of two all female historically Black colleges in the country. So I am very proud to be a Spelman grad and wanted to share with you all the story of how I actually ended up at Spelman. I grew up a military kid and I got a chance in one life to experience two branches of the military. My dad was in the Air Force until he retired. My parents got divorced when I was around six or so. My mom later entered the Army. When my mom entered the Army as a nurse, then we did a little bit of traveling. And that traveling led us to, I'm thinking this must have been Walter Reed. I have to ask my mom now. I have to ask my mom, you all. My mom might come back on here and verify these things.

Amena Brown:

But my mom was in the military. Nevertheless, she was a nurse at a hospital that I'm thinking is Walter Reed because of how old I was at the time. I was nine years old. My mom took me to where she worked, to the hospital. I got a chance to meet a pediatrician there. Her name was Dr. Wilkes. My mom tells the story that she introduced me to Dr. Wilkes who was a very good friend of hers. She let Dr. Wilkes take me into her office. My mom didn't actually go in the office with us. All she knows is when I came out of being in Dr. Wilkes office, I told my mom that I was going to go to Spelman. I've had this dream to go to Spelman since I was nine years old. We lived in Silver Spring, Maryland at this time when my mom was working at Walter Reed, which was a very big military medical center at the time.

Amena Brown:

My best friend Portia, we were best friends in elementary school. We had this pact between us that we were both going to go to Spelman. Then in the middle of sixth grade year, my mom ended up getting stationed in Texas, in San Antonio. And so I moved away from all the East Coast things and ended up in Texas where I spent the rest of junior high and all of high school, but I never forgot about wanting to go to Spelman. Spelman was still my number one choice. Of course, this was also in an era of time in my middle school, into high school years. This was the era of a different world and getting a chance to see this fictional representation of a historically Black college. But also in my case, some of the representation that was happening on a different world was actually part of Spelman's campus.

Amena Brown:

Some of the pictures of what were the dorms and different things were actual buildings at Spelman, right? Shout out to those of you that are listening and remember this magazine, but there was a magazine at this time called Young Sisters and Brothers. It was called YSB Magazine. Every year or maybe more than once a year, but I remember it being every year, YSB would have a whole issue. Part of the issue would be dedicated to historically Black colleges. It would have rankings and different things you could learn. I remember taking all those out of the magazine and putting them up on my walls. I come from a family that there was a lot of conversation about education. I don't remember in my upbringing it really being like a choice about going to college.

Amena Brown:

My grandmother, my mother, everybody that was around me growing up was talking to me a lot about where did I want to go to college, what did I think I might want to study. All these questions that had the assumption in them, you're going to college. It's just, where do you want to go? What do you think you'll do when you get there? Do you think you'll pledge when you get there? You know, all those questions. Also, my junior high and high school time, my mom and I attended. My mom, my sister and I, we attended a good size Black church in San Antonio, Texas. There was a lot of emphasis on education in our church. Every year, it got to be around May time of the year, there would be one service every year that would just celebrate all the graduates.

Amena Brown:

People that were graduating high school, college, people who were graduating from grad school. It was this big to-do of our church community really wanting to lift up education as being something that was really important for us as Black folks. So I had that in my family, but I also had that in this church that I was going to. There was always this big celebration whenever students were graduating from high school. They would have a time where they would announce where those kids were going to college. There would just be this uproar in the audience at whatever school you had been accepted to. Giving you this idea of what that sort of end of high school time was for me as it got to be time to begin applying for schools. I ended up applying to Spelman.

Amena Brown:

I also applied to Clark Atlanta because even then and today, Clark Atlanta has a fantastic mass media and communications program. I hope it's still called that because it's been a while since I was in college, you all. But they had a wonderful mass media communications program. I just thought, I want to get to Atlanta. There was something about the city of Atlanta that I felt like my future was there. I was like, I'll apply to Spelman. I'll apply to Clark Atlanta. At least I have two shots of getting into one of these and actually getting to the city that I really want to go to. But then as I was getting in the process of applying for college, my mom was starting to ask me like, "You're not going to apply to any schools in Texas?"

Amena Brown:

And honestly, the thought hadn't crossed my mind. No shade to my listeners that live in Texas, but I just never quite felt at home at home in Texas. Texas felt like home to me because my mom was there and my mom is home to me. But Texas never felt like home. When we moved there, I just anticipated that I'm going to turn 18 and go live somewhere else. And really, even more specifically that I wanted to just return to the East Coast, that I had enjoyed living in the D.C. area. I just wanted to be back in that part of the country. My mom had asked me about applying to Texas schools so I applied to two Texas schools to have a safety. I applied to Texas A&M at College Station. I applied to University of Texas at Austin or UT.

Amena Brown:

Also, I had been courted a little bit by Sarah Lawrence, which was in New York. Sarah Lawrence actually wanted me to go early decision. I was afraid to go early decision because that would mean if I got into Spelman that I wouldn't be able to go. You know, if I got into Spelman and got into Sarah Lawrence, that I'd have to go to Sarah Lawrence. So I did apply to Sarah Lawrence, but I didn't end up going early decision because I really wanted to see was I going to get into Spelman or not. Let me tell you all what it was like applying for college in the '90s. Some of you all are going to be like, what were you all doing? Why was life like this? But it's wild to me now to think that my whole college application was on paper. Nothing was electronic yet.

Amena Brown:

I'm applying for college between '97 and the beginning of '98. We were just getting used to having a little bit of the internet, but it was still like dial up and modem and AOL where you had a limited amount of hours that you might have available to use the internet. But nothing of the college application process was online. Everything was on paper. The only thing that I remember doing on the computer was typing out my essays and different things like that and printing them out, things like that to put into the packet. I do remember this really interesting time and I don't know if this is just a part of being a teenager and that sort of change in life when you're about to graduate high school and go into whatever is next for you that may potentially take you away from your parents' house.

Amena Brown:

But I remember starting to lag behind on my college applications, because applying for college is a lot of work. It's essays and the application itself, it's gathering all the letters of recommendation that you need to get from your guidance counselor or other teachers, and filling out all this stuff about your extracurricular activities. I mean, I just remember it being, it would be a lot even applying to one school, not to mention if you're trying to apply to multiple schools. And so I think I was good on it for a while. I really don't know if I started getting afraid, I can't remember consciously doing this, but I look back on it and kind of feel like I started slowing up on the deadlines and different things that I was supposed to be turning in. My mom noticed that I was doing that.

Amena Brown:

I will never forget this. She called me into her bathroom and basically got in my grill and was like, "You are slowing down on getting the things together for your college applications that you need." And in the way that a mother could threaten you in the late '90s, she did. She was just basically like, "You're going to turn 18 and you're getting out of this house to go someplace. And I would like for it to be college for you, but you're going to leave here and go someplace. Okay? So you're going to go there and sit at that computer and finish your essays and do all the things you're supposed to do." And there was something about her getting in my face, getting in my grill a little bit that kind of like shook me back into reality. And so that's what pushed me to finish the rest of my college applications. Okay.

Amena Brown:

Because this was the era of all the paper, it's so wild to me today to see like when kids get into college that they're finding out on the computer, in their email or something, it's all digital now. Right? But we were literally waiting to get snail mail. We were waiting to get physical envelopes from these schools to tell us if we got in. Typically, if you got a big envelope and a thick envelope, then that meant you got in, because that meant they were sending you the additional paperwork and all that stuff that you needed for whatever your next steps were. If you got the thin envelope, then that was typically how you knew you didn't get in, because on the thin envelope they were typically, we regret to inform you and whatever, whatever, you know.

Amena Brown:

I remember all the schools that I applied to, I got in to all of them except I was technically accepted into Sarah Lawrence but I was accepted on a wait list, which is fascinating, right? That they were wanting me to go early decision, then I didn't and I got in, but they were like, ah, we'd only have a slot for you if someone else decides not to accept their acceptance letter. The last of all the acceptance letters to come was Spelman. I feel like maybe it was around February that I started getting some of the other acceptance letters and I don't think it was till late March or early April that I got the acceptance letter from Spelman. I was over the moon to get that envelope. I was so excited. It had all the information about room and board and getting you started on filling out all the stuff for who your roommates were going to be and all those things.

Amena Brown:

I have a picture, I'm going to have to see if I can find it, you all, because I think it's in my senior book. But I have a picture of me in a Spelman t-shirt that Dr. Wilkes many years later had given to me. I had been wearing it for years. It still fit me. I took pictures of myself wearing that shirt right as I was starting to pack up and get ready to attend Spelman. You might be asking, did I ever visit Spelman? Did I ever step foot on the grounds of the school? And the answer to that is no. I don't know that I would advise anyone when you're applying to colleges to not visit them. But Spelman was just such a, it was like a revered place to me but was also a trusted place because I knew an alumna. I knew Spelman's reputation just in America and worldwide in some regards that I felt like whatever's there is great. Whatever's there, I'm cool. I'm with it.

Amena Brown:

I even went to Atlanta the summer before I went to college. I think we may have driven by like the area, the Atlanta University Center, but we didn't go in deep enough that I got to see the campus. So I did not see Spelman's campus until it was move in day for me, which would've been August of '98. This was a fascinating time moving into college into a dorm and all that is just, just a fascinating time now thinking about it. I mean, my mom and dad both having been in the military, I had experienced a lot of travel early on in my life. So the concept of moving someplace that I didn't really know anybody, we had no family in Atlanta. I think we had one friend that had gone to the same church that I grew up in. She was like a mentor to me. We knew her.

Amena Brown:

And so my mom and I stayed at her house when we got to the city before it was time for me to move in. But she was the only person that I knew in Atlanta. I didn't know anybody here. I didn't think I knew anybody else that was applying to Spelman and had gotten in. Although fun fact, my friend Portia that I mentioned to you earlier, I was in line to get my first ID at Spelman and who did I run into in the line but Portia. Fun fact, Portia and I both ended up applying to Spelman and getting in and graduated the same year. Shout out to Portia, girl. I'm going to tell you what's interesting in thinking about my college experience, because you have heard me talk in previous episodes. I think Celita and I touched on this in our, How to Survive a Friend Break-up episode.

Amena Brown:

I may have talked about this in some other places here as well, but you know, I had an interesting college experience. Because for me, coming to college was a time to be very focused and to get what I came for in a sense. I was a church girl. I was very sheltered. I think there were other people around us and around our family at the time that just thought, oh, that girl is about to go to Atlanta and get turned all the way out, you know? But in reality, I was too afraid. I was too afraid to actually let myself get turned out, you know? I think in some ways I look back on it and think, you know, I felt some pressure and I'm not sure that it was a bad sense of pressure. But here I was, my mom's a single mom, just sacrificed so much for my sister and I. Sacrificed a lot for me to be able to go to Spelman because it wasn't cheap and it wasn't something we could afford to write a check for and that kind of thing.

Amena Brown:

Then my church was so supportive of me, not even just in their encouraging words but in their money. Members of the church were giving me money for my application fee to stay in the dorm. They were providing me with money to start my first bank account when I moved here to Atlanta to go to school. So I felt this great sense of like, I don't want to go home having squandered the support of all these people in my life that are believing in me and are wanting to see me succeed. So when I got to Spelman, it was time for business as far as I was concerned. Part of that was because I was coming from having been so heavily involved in my church and in doing ministry work, the thought was, well, if I get involved in other like church activities of some kind, then that will be a way for me to stay out of trouble because that's how my time in high school was.

Amena Brown:

I was very involved in my church and then doing a lot of activities there that really kept me literally from having time to get in trouble. You know? As soon as I got to Spelman, I pretty quickly got plugged into a campus ministry that is now defunct and joined a church and just tried to get around as many other Christian and church going folks as I could in hopes that that would insulate me in a way. And in some ways it did, right. We'll talk a little bit more about that in future episodes. In some ways I'm like, well, but we'll talk about that. There was a guy that I dated. I want you to know, you can't see my fingers but I'm doing very large quotation marks, air quotation marks here, "dated." There was a guy I dated when I was growing up in church. If I would've had a high school sweetheart, I probably would have considered it to be him.

Amena Brown:

Although I don't know that we even dated long enough to be considered high school sweethearts necessarily, but we went to the same church. He was a year older than me. I'm not going to say his name to protect the innocent/or the guilty. Probably both actually, the innocent and the guilty. We dated. And when I say dated, we did what my mom allowed, which was I got to wear his starter jacket. Shout out to that. At church, I got to hang out with him at church. I got to hang out with him when our families were at social functions, and that's it. We didn't go places alone, he and I, so that's why I tell you the dating is very loose there. He was a year ahead of me. I thought he was going to apply to Duke because Duke was his number one choice, but he also ended up applying to Morehouse College.

Amena Brown:

And if you're not familiar with the Atlanta University Center, at that time, Atlanta University Center was comprised of six schools. It was Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morris Brown University or College, Morris Brown. I can't remember if it was university or college right now, you all. And Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, I'm pretty sure. Four, those four. Then The Interdenominational Theological Center and Morehouse School of Medicine. Those were the six schools that were there in the Atlanta University Center, all within walking distance together. Some of these schools kind of shared of resource in certain ways that you could kind of take classes across campus. I took writing classes at Morehouse as well.

Amena Brown:

He, almost said his name. He got into Morehouse and he started emailing me from school. Basically, he was telling me all the things I needed to be prepared were going to be going on when I got to Spelman. He was telling me how much weed he smoked and all the parties he was going to. He was laying the groundwork with me that his parents had given him a car, and anywhere I needed to go, he was totally willing to take me there. I think that he thought I was going to get these letters from him and want to like rekindle things with him when I got to Spelman. Probably thought I would be very naive and wide-eyed and ready to listen to all his wisdom as a sophomore, I guess. But his emails immediately were like red alerts to me because I'm thinking if you're partying and smoking weed, we can't hang out because I need to graduate and I need to not be sent home for anything. Like I need to make it through school because I have all these people behind me supporting me.

Amena Brown:

So there's this particular moment that I remember, my first year. There were a few moments that happened to me in my first year at Spelman that were really indicative to me that this wasn't high school anymore. You're in college now. Are you going to try and reinvent yourself and be someone else completely, right? Because there are all these new people there that are meeting you. You don't have any sense of a reputation with them. You get to decide who you're going to be. If you're going to reinvent someone new, if you're going to be who you are and deal with the process of that. There were a couple of moments right there that I was like, okay, I am still my same church girl self. I can try to pretend and be more knowledgeable about life and pretend that I'm more as they would've said back then worldly or whatever, you know, but I just wasn't. I was a church girl. I was a nerd. I was a bookworm, that's me. That was who I was.

Amena Brown:

This guy that I told you all I "dated," he tried to reconnect with me once I got to Spelman. He really wanted me to give him my phone number. I had a rule my first year of school that I would not give my phone. I would not give my phone number in general to anyone that I felt uncomfortable with, but I would also not give my phone number to someone I hadn't had more interactions with to kind of get to know them and see if they were a trustworthy person. Right. I want you all to know that this was mainly out of just me being scared of everything that I was doing, making these choices here. But that's what I felt like I had to do to survive there. Right. I remember he was very upset with me. He got very angry with me. My roommates were with me in the parking lot of Spelman. He was badgering me like, "You're really going to walk away and not give me your number?" I was like, "Yes, I am."

Amena Brown:

He was getting so angry about it that it started making my roommates angry too. They were like, "She said that she don't want you to have her number," like back off, back off, you know? It was one of those moments in young Amena's life where I would have this happen to me, and this happened to me in my adult life later too, that sometimes I would be in a dating situation or something. I would end up in a situation where I would get to watch that person react to something in this way that I was getting to see sort of an element of their true self, not just the representative that they put out there. I didn't know that he was going to have a temper like that or that it was going to get under his skin that badly, that I just didn't want him to have a way outside of email to reach me, you know. So on a level, that moment was empowering for me but I also remember going to Sisters Chapel, which is our chapel on Spelman's campus.

Amena Brown:

At that time, I think now there is again a prayer room in the basement of the chapel. At that time, it was not the renovated prayer room that's there now. It was the old prayer room with the old, like thick velvety carpeting and it was full of mosquitoes. You had to kind of turn on this window unit AC in hopes that it would blow all of the mosquitoes away. I remember I left my dorm after we got back on campus. I remember walking over to Sisters Chapel and going into that prayer room and just praying to God for God to help me make it through school. It was really important to me to stay focused and succeed there. There were a lot of things that I knew could derail me. I was in that little place just realizing, here I am, I'm here, you know, without my mom, without my church community. This is on me.

Amena Brown:

I think in a way it gave my relationship to God something more personal because I was getting a chance to really have real talk with God myself, you know? That is a very big moment that I think happening in those first couple of months of school kind of set the groundwork for how the rest of my time of school would be. Another moment that I've shared a lot when I go to colleges that happened that first semester at Spelman. My mentor that I told you was like the one person that I knew in Atlanta, she would check in on me. She was married at the time and so she and her husband sometimes would call me at school and he'd get on one phone at the house and she'd get on the other phone. They'd kind of check in on me. He asked me, he was like, "So have you decided what you want to major in?" And you all, my initial major at Spelman was psychology and I'll tell you why.

Amena Brown:

I felt called to preach. For those of you that grew up in church, this is familiar phrasing, right? This feeling called to something. Typically, when someone has this experience when they're growing up in a church environment, it's typically not that you're like I knew I felt called to be a doctor or something like that. That's typically not what happens. People use that term typically to mean something related to ministry or church. You feel called to be an evangelist. You feel called to be a preacher. And I felt called to preach or pastor or something like that as a very young person around 12 or 13. Growing up, as I have also shared here on the podcast, you know, I grew up watching a lot of women preach. I grew up in a church where I was watching some of the women just preach the house down and preach way better than the men could preach.

Amena Brown:

So I would study over time what the women preachers had studied when they were an undergrad. A lot of them studied psychology in undergrad, and then they went on to seminary. That was my plan originally, you all. I was going to go to Spelman, get my degree in psychology, become a preacher. I was going to attend ITC, which was The Interdenominational Theological Center because my pastors had attended there. My mentor had attended there. Then I was like, I guess I'll see what happens if I'll pastor or preach or whatever I'll do when I finish that, but that was my plan. And this day, first couple of months of school, I'm on the phone with my mentor and her husband. He says, "Okay, what's your major?" I tell him psychology. He's like, "Okay." I explained to him the whole thing I just told you all what I've intended to be.

Amena Brown:

He was like, "Okay." He had attended ITC as well. Then he said, "Let me ask you this." He said, "If you were rich and you had all the money in the world, like you had so much money that you didn't have to go to college to get a job," he said, "Would you still go to college?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Why?" I said, "So I could write about it." He said, "Okay." He said, "Well then, after you finished college, what would you do with your time?" I said, "Oh, I would write books and I would travel the country and speak to people and do book signings and stuff." He said, "That, what you just described doesn't sound like psychology. It sounds like English, like an English major." My immediate thought was, "I'm not going to major in English because English majors are broke."

Amena Brown:

My mom truthfully had hopes that I would eventually want to go to med school, because before I got down my preacher train, I was going to be a gynecologist when I was younger. But let me tell you all, I thought that the job of a gynecologist was basically talking to women all day. I thought that someone else was like the shampoo assistant that did all the surgeries and exams and all that stuff. And then when the women needed someone to explain to them the procedures or give them counsel on their health, that that's what they came to the gynecologist for. That's totally what I wanted to be for a long time to the point that at a certain point my mom took me to the hospital that she worked at in San Antonio, introduced me to a Black woman gynecologist there.

Amena Brown:

I met her, did a tour of the hospital with her. She said, "Yeah, my job is 75% surgery." I was like, oh, knock me over with a feather. That's not what I signed up for. I was signing up for 85% talking. The irony is truly, I have made a living now of spending a lot of my time talking to women. In what I imagined a gynecologist did, I'm totally doing that for a living now without surgery at all. But that is what made me also switch away from thinking about medical school. But when I was a psych major, my mom, she had her hopes up still like you could be a psychiatrist, you could still do that. When I went to her and told her that I was thinking about changing my major to English after this conversation, that was one of the first things my mom said to me.

Amena Brown:

She was like, "You know, having an English major can be really great for you going into medical school because you'll have all your writing skills. That's important for a doctor too." But I have to give a shout out to my mom because my mom just was dreaming big for me, but she also wanted for me to be able to do whatever I was passionate about. When I went to her about changing my major, she didn't give me any static. I switched over to English because I thought to myself, well, at the end of the day, I'm the one who has to sit in these classes and do all this work. I've always loved reading and I've always loved writing. I truly do in my dream dream want to be a writer. English seems right. I feel like there was so much alignment that happened in my life at the moment that I changed over to that major and majored in English at Spelman.

Amena Brown:

Fast forward to my last year at Spelman, I'm there in my English major. You've heard me talk about this here on the podcast. I've started going to open mics out in the city. I'm performing spoken word on campus and off campus too. Just finding myself, feeling just so passionate about writing and about those possibilities for me. Feeling really challenged. My studies at Spelman were very, very rigorous. I cannot really recall a lot of classes that just felt like they were super easy. I mean, it was rigorous scholarship. It was rigorous academic work. And I also have to say it was a competitive place to be going to school, not in the sense that I felt I was in competition with my classmates, but in the sense that as we were all matriculating, you're watching these amazing Black women that you're in class with get scholarships to these amazing grad schools.

Amena Brown:

You're watching them get internships at these amazing companies and then subsequently get hired at those companies even before they graduated. Right. In that sense, it was a competitive environment to be in because you were seeing all of these Black women around you succeeding. And there I was sort of feeling I think a little aimless as I was getting into my last year. Inside my heart, I wanted to be young Toni Morrison, young Alice Walker, young Nikki Giovanni. But when I looked at their careers, a lot of their amazing opportunities came to them when they were in their 30s and 40s. So I almost felt like I'm graduating at 22. I need to find something to do, to bide my time until this magical period of my 30s will come along when all this amazing career stuff will happen to me. I just didn't know what to do.

Amena Brown:

The only thing I could think to do that I thought would bide me time was apply to grad school. And so I applied to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. I applied to the University of Pittsburgh. I applied to NYU. I applied to Georgia State. And to give you context of the timing when I was graduating from college, 9/11 happened the September of my last year of college. There are a lot of ways those of us, I would consider myself to be Gen X still. I don't know what the years are based on who's Gen X or who's millennial, but I would consider myself to be Gen X. It's interesting for those of us who are Gen X to talk with folks who are millennials and talk about what it was like for those of us that were graduating college at that time, right after 9/11.

Amena Brown:

The strange place the economy was in at that moment, that we also were dealing with a lot of that economic fallout and what that meant for how we were going to be able to get our lives or our careers started. When I've talked to a lot of my friends who are millennials, it's interesting to reflect upon what for them what some of their times were like getting out of college and sharing with them what that was like for those of us that were graduates in 2002, but we were graduating into an economy that was still trying to rebuild itself after such a tragic moment had happened at 9/11. By the time I was graduating, things were still kind of, I feel like people were still scrambling a little bit and a lot of us were yearning to find something that felt like stability to us, I think. It was like I knew inside I want to be a writer but I'm not sure.

Amena Brown:

So I applied to grad school because maybe that'll buy me time. Masters of Fine Arts is the terminal degree, but it's also 2002 at this point. Spoken word as an art was not considered to be academic. It wasn't considered that. In the ways now that you know some well-known spoken word poets that are professors, that are also academics in addition to being performing artist. But that just wasn't true when I was graduating school. It was sort of like the spoken word poets were doing wonderful and rigorous work, but were not considered to be respected in academic world. So me submitting a portfolio at that time that was full of spoken word poetry was like, who wants to see that? We're looking for couplets and sestinas.

Amena Brown:

We're looking for your sonnets. That was the kind of work that a lot of those schools were looking to see. Right? Long story short, a girl applied to three grad schools to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. A girl did not get in to any of those grad schools. It's funny now to think about that, that I ended up making a career as a poet when I tried to apply to get the highest degree in poetry and couldn't get in. My last year into my first year as post grad was a really interesting time because I really didn't have a plan B after grad school didn't work out. But one of the things I knew about myself and this is kind of interesting because whenever I talk to young folks, when I talk to people who were college age, I always want to encourage them. That just because you're young doesn't mean that you don't understand your own inner voice. It doesn't mean that you don't know some things to be true. You may have a lot more in life that you've got to learn or experience, but who doesn't? Right?

Amena Brown:

All of us have things we have to learn and experience. But when I think back on my 22 year old self, my 22 year old self knew that I wasn't built for corporate America, knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I would probably need to do something that would involve me having to have my own different path. Right. The thing I didn't know was what do I do about that? You know? Where do I go to get started? Right? Probably if I knew what I know now, I would've studied entrepreneurship a lot more because that's really what I was heading towards. If I was going to have a career as an artist and a writer, I was headed towards being a business woman and having to learn how to run my own business. I probably would've studied that a bit more, but I didn't know that so I had a rough and tumble journey like many of us do to discovering what I wanted to be doing for a career and for a job.

Amena Brown:

When I think now about my time attending Spelman and what does it mean to me to be a Spelman woman or a Spelmanite and how do I think that time impacted me, I think number one, there was something so, like beautiful doesn't even really tell what I'm trying to say to you all. Like there was something so beautiful and impactful to have gone to school with all Black women from all over the world. It was so fascinating to be in one demographic really, but experience so much diversity among us. You know, I was coming from Texas. There was a certain way that I dressed. The girls who were coming from the Northeast, there was a certain way they dressed or spoke. Right? And the West Coast, and the girls coming from the Caribbean, and the girls from different countries in Africa. It was like we were truly representative of Black women all over the diaspora.

Amena Brown:

I knew Black girls at Spelman that grew up Catholic and watched them walking to mass on Sundays. And where I grew up, I didn't know anybody Black that was Catholic. I was meeting Black girls that grew up Baha'i or grew up atheist or agnostic, or grew up Muslim. You know, just all of these rich experiences that we brought to each other, that we were truly, truly not a monolith. And to actually have been able to experience that is really one of the inspirations behind my poem, Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl. Because it has a line in it that says, "We Black girl in every way we want to." Going to Spelman was literally watching Black girls becoming Black women and being Black girls in whatever way we wanted to. I think there was something really powerful about experiencing the freedom of that at such a young and impressionable time in my life.

Amena Brown:

I will say it mattered to me that I got into Spelman. That was a big deal to me. It mattered to me graduating from Spelman, but every touch point I've had back to my alma mater, it matters to me even more, the more time goes on. This year 2022, as of this recording, this year will be my 20 year college reunion. We reunion every five years. At each reunion, like when I do my reunion since I graduated in 2002, all the graduates or I should say all the alumni of Spelman that graduated in years that ended in two and seven also reunion with me. That's 2002, it's 2012, right? The students that are graduating in 2002 will eventually reunion with me, but it's also 1967 and 1942. We are getting a chance to know all of these rich sisterhood and heritage.

Amena Brown:

When we're at our college reunion, we are seeing Black women who are our grandmothers or sometimes our great-grandmothers ages that walked similar halls that we did. We're also seeing the students that are at their first college reunion that have only been out of college for five years. There's been something really beautiful about being a part of that legacy for me that just roots me and grounds me in my place in the world that I think is so powerful. The last thing and really important thing that I feel I gathered from having been a Spelman graduate and having attended there is because I was going to school with all Black women, there was this confidence that I feel I gained that I don't think I realized actually until I was years out in the workforce. You know? There was this confidence I gained there because we learned a lot of Black history. We learned a lot of womanism and Black feminism. We were really steeped in not only what are the systems that oppress us, but also what does liberation look like?

Amena Brown:

What does it look like to be empowered as a Black woman? What does it look like to be free? Right? And so I realized that between being a Spelman grad, having grown up in a Black church that instilled a lot of confidence in me, having been raised by and around confident Black women, the combination of that for me meant that I entered a lot of spaces that maybe some of the people there thought I didn't belong. My early parts of my career as you all know were in White Christian conservative spaces. Many of those spaces I was the only Black person there, the only young person there, the only woman there. For many, many years it was that way. But I didn't feel like I didn't deserve to be there. I feel like that was instilled in me from going to Spelman, that there was not a place as a Black woman that I didn't deserve to be just like anybody else. You're at the table. I deserve to be at the table just like anybody else.

Amena Brown:

You're getting the invitation. I deserve the invitation just like anybody else. You're getting the salary. I deserve the salary just like anybody else. I don't think I knew that at 22, but I think by the time I was in my early 30s and had really gotten into the work of my career, I realized there is a confidence in me that was instilled in me through Black women, and in some particular ways through the Black women that are a part of Spelman's community. So big shout out to Spelman. I still am so proud to be a graduate of Spelman. I am so proud to have experienced what it's like to attend a historically Black college and university. Shout out to being a Spelman. It is really wonderful. Shout out to all my Spelman sisters who are listening.

Amena Brown:

Thank you all for checking out this episode with me and being in the living room with me while I talked about that time I went to Spelman. I'm looking forward to coming back and talking more about what happened in my journey in Atlanta after deciding to make Atlanta home after graduating Spelman. So tune in for that. See you all next time. 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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 61

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Check out this episode from the HER archives from the before times where I talk with photographer, filmmaker and founder of Phyllis Iller, Melissa Alexander. Melissa shares how her work is connected to her neighborhood and rooted in Black joy. Listen in as we discuss the lessons we've both learned being full-time entrepreneurs in the creative industry.

Amena Brown:

Ooh y'all, welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. I'm so excited. I know those of you that have been listening to my podcast a while probably think I'm excited every time, but it's true because I get a chance to interview so many amazing women and today's episode is no different. I am very excited to welcome photographer, filmmaker, founder of Phyllis Iller. She says that her work celebrates the inherent dope of the individual. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa Alexander.

Melissa Alexander:

Thank you.

Amena Brown:

Oh my goodness. Melissa, listen to me. I am such a fan of your work and I was trying to remember actually how I first found out about your work. And I think we either have worked with some of the same people and or may have some mutual friends because I feel like it was like someone had tagged you in a something and I was like, "Ooh, what's this?" Then I was on your Insta like, "This is amazing." So when I was thinking about exploring the theme Taste, I thought that you would be such a great voice to speak to that. How your taste in images and art and curation plays such a big role in your work. So thank you girl for being on this podcast.

Melissa Alexander:

Thank you for having me. I am absolutely excited just like you are just to share space and come together to maybe help other people, but just to share stories. I think there's a lot of power in that. A lot of power in recognizing yourself in others. So thank you for having me.

Amena Brown:

I know that you are gifted in quite a few ways and photography is just one of them. And I would love to ask you my origin story question I like to ask guests at the beginning. What are your earliest memories of being interested in photography? When you look back at your little girl self, do you see these remnants there of what you are now or what you are doing now in your work?

Melissa Alexander:

I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't really have an interest in photography. What ended up happening was when I was about 15 I was really into drum and bass and trance and electronica. And I told my dad. My dad asked me ... He was like, "What do you want for Christmas?" And I was like, "All right, look, this is what I want. I want two turntables, a mixer and speakers." Because I thought I was going to be this big DJ in Europe. And I knew I needed to get a head start. And my dad was like, "Okay, no problem." And when Christmas came that year, I looked under the tree, very excited and I didn't see any boxes. He handed me a little box and I was like, "Well, that doesn't look like two turntables, a mixer and some speakers." And it ended up being a digital camera.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

And I was like ... I was still very thankful for it. A little disappointed, but still thankful nonetheless. And when I turned it on I figured out how to use it. The different settings and stuff. And I just realized I really enjoyed taking pictures. Of capturing moments. It wasn't anything where I said, "Oh, this is what I'm going to do." At the time I was really into art history and I wanted to be a curator. I wanted to work at the Fete gallery in Florence. That was my professional aspiration was. And so when I told my dad that I was going to go to school to study art history, he was like, "You might as well study basket weaving." And I was like, "Okay, so what am I going to do?" And he was like, "You're going to study business and French."

Melissa Alexander:

And I did that for a little while. But again, I went through college a couple times actually, but all throughout those years my camera was there just to take pictures of my friends and to remember things and things like that. It wasn't until I was about probably around 28, 29 that I got my first "real camera". And I was taking pictures around West End here in Atlanta and just on the street. Just doing street photography. And people were like, "Wow, these are really good." And then I was like, "Oh, really? Thanks. So I'll post more." And I started posting more.

Melissa Alexander:

And then it became, "I'll pay you to take pictures." And I was like, "Wait a minute. You're going to pay me to do this thing that I've done for well over 15 years now?" And they were like, "Yeah." And I was like, "All right. Okay. So let's see how this goes." And pretty much from there, my love affair ... I started to really develop my style. I started to really develop why I like taking pictures. I started to understand why I like taking pictures. And then it led me pretty much down the path I am today, sitting right here with you right now.

Amena Brown:

I love to hear all of the history that came into that. I mean, your interest in art history, that's fascinating to me because you can see in your work that there is a lot of depth in there.

Melissa Alexander:

You know what's funny? What's funny about that is that a lot of my favorite artists when I was in high school were people who were artists or painters who dealt with a lot of shadow. So Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Goya. When I look at those artists, I realize that I've done the same thing or I'm seeking to do almost the same thing that they did with paint and oils and all of that. I seek to do that with my camera and my lighting and I just actually make brown people look like that. Black and brown people look like that.

Amena Brown:

I love that so much. Okay. So I know you live here in Atlanta, which makes me excited because we've never met in person, listeners, but you know now I'm going to be trying everything I can to meet Melissa in person. So are you originally from Atlanta or did you grow up elsewhere?

Melissa Alexander:

I grew up in Jonesboro actually. Let me say by this. I was born in Oakland, California, but my dad was in banking and so we moved every few years. So I was born in Oakland, then we lived in Houston, then we lived in Dallas, Texas. And then we moved from Dallas, Texas to Maryland. Gaithersburg, Maryland, right outside of Washington, DC. And then we moved to just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. And so this is all pretty much by the time I'm 10. I've lived all those different places. And then when I was 10, my parents divorced and my dad had custody of us. So we moved down to Jonesboro, Georgia. So when people ask me, "Where are you from?" I without a question, tell them that I'm a southerner and that I'm from Georgia because my sensibilities and everything about me is based here. I remember when Ludacris was on the radio so-

Amena Brown:

Yes. Yes. Come on, Chris Lova Lova. Yes.

Melissa Alexander:

You feel what I'm saying? Chris Lova Lova & Poon Daddy. So I know that I'm from here. My family is from New York. So when they hear me speak, they're like, "Oh, you can't be from down here." But I'm like, "Listen, if you walk past my porch and you don't tell me good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, we're going to have a problem." So that's how I know that I'm from here.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. That's totally a rule of the south. There's a lot of weight around speaking. I remember getting in trouble or watching other kids get in trouble for, if you walked into a room ... Say, if I was at home and I walk into a room and my mom has a friend over or another family member came over since I've been upstairs in my room, whatever I was doing, you say hello. It's very important that you speak. That is a big southern thing.

Melissa Alexander:

That is. It really, really is. And it's funny because I have to tell my daughter. My daughter was born in South Carolina, but we've been here since ... We moved back to Atlanta in the end of 2014. So she was about four then. So she's 10 now. So she's lived here most of her life in Georgia. And I have to explain things to sometimes. And I'm like, "Hey, yeah, you speak, regardless of who's in the room, regardless if you know them, regardless if you know their name. You say hello, you greet them and that's just how we do."

Melissa Alexander:

I come from a family of children are to be seen and not heard. It's a very old school, west Indian upbringing, because that's how my parents were raised. My parents are a little bit older than most parents I guess maybe for a child who's 34. But they were very children are to be seen, not heard. Don't say anything unless you're spoken to. But growing up down here, you speak and then you're quiet, but you still speak first and you say miss such and such or mister such and such. But that's kind of a beautiful thing. I think about that sometimes how maybe it seems a little formal, but it just feels like that's the proper way to do things. You know?

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And it gives you this way to honor other people, even if you don't know them. Even if you're just meeting them. When I go into professional environments, I work in a lot of spaces where I'm getting to an event and it's a room full of strangers. The whole team, everybody, I don't know anyone there. But that's how you get to know people by saying hello and honoring their presence. There is something really beautiful about that lesson, but you totally brought that home to me just now when you were saying you do not walk by my porch and not speak. That is rude.

Melissa Alexander:

And seriously. I even think about it in terms of ... Because West End ... I mean, when were you here?

Amena Brown:

I was in the West End '98 to 2002.

Melissa Alexander:

Okay. So you went to ... Did you go to one of the HBCUs?

Amena Brown:

Yeah. I went to school in the AU. I went to Spelman.

Melissa Alexander:

Oh, that's cute. I love working with Spelman. And it's funny because Spelman has such a energy around it. When I started working with them I was thinking ... In my head I had this idea of what a Spelman woman was like. But as I've grown with them and most specifically on my side, as I've grown in working with them, I realize that Spelman is full of homegirls, man.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Alexander:

They're smart. They're smart. They are smart as a whip, but they are still homegirls and you can still get a verbal lashing. Don't get it twisted. But when you're in those halls and you're walking on that campus, it has such a energy about it. I really love going there. And I love the fact that I'm able to bring my daughter there too. That's where she wants to go. I told her, I said, "You better do really well in school."

Amena Brown:

That part, because look-

Melissa Alexander:

"Listen, mama's making it, mama's doing it but Spelman's ... It ain't cheap." But no, I don't want to diminish her dreams but what I was going to say was just in terms of the speaking thing, is that with ... I do like for people to speak when they pass by my porch, but with Atlanta and specifically West End being gentrified in the way that it is I've come to realize that ... This is my first time really seeing a neighborhood go through gentrification. And so as I've been here ... I've been here for about five years. As I've seen it from the beginning and even when I moved here probably wasn't the beginning. But from when I've seen it to now my idea of what a gentrifier actually is, is somewhat changing.

Melissa Alexander:

I initially thought that a gentrifier was just a white person who moved into a Black neighborhood. And it could still be that. It could still definitely be that.

Amena Brown:

Sure.

Melissa Alexander:

I realize that it's more like if you walk past my porch and you don't say anything and you just look at me and you keep walking with your dog or your jogging stroller or whatever it is, you don't wave or maybe you just don't even look in my direction, to me, that's a gentrifier because you don't want to know your neighbor. I have white neighbors who walk by. Just yesterday in fact, this one lady, she has her dogs in the front porch all the time. And they're always barking anytime we walk by. And this time they didn't bark so I looked up at her and I smiled, she waved. And I was like, "Your dogs are doing better." And she was like, "Yeah." And as soon as she said that they started barking and we laughed about it. And I waved at her as I was walking past and she waved back. And I was like, that to me, maybe ... I'm not saying just off of that interaction that she's not a gentrifier, but it lets me know that she's open to her neighbor.

Melissa Alexander:

And I think that's a really big thing because a Black person could move over here. As historical as it is and all of that stuff. And we know that we've been here for years and years, but they could move in here and very easily say, "Ugh, you guys had the Malcolm X festival in West End park for 30 years. Please keep the drums down."

Amena Brown:

Right, right.

Melissa Alexander:

Right. It's just interesting how perspectives can shift when you're open to them shifting.

Amena Brown:

I really love that. And I almost feel like my love and affinity for the West End grows more as I am here in the city longer. Having spent those few years in school. And when I went back after maybe our fifth year or 10th year reunion and went back around the neighborhood, I was like, "What? What is happening here? This is completely different than how things were in the city." And of course I was coming to Atlanta that two plus years after the Olympics. And the city was in all of this sort of change and all the work that had been done. Some in good ways and some in not so good ways to sort of make the city this global entity in a way. This global destination.

Amena Brown:

And there were some pluses to that and some minuses to that. And to see the West End not just surviving but thriving in a lot of ways and wanting now ... You know when you're younger, you don't always think about how important it is to preserve history and what are the places where history lives? And it lives in the buildings and it lives in the people. And how do we preserve those stories? All that stuff is way more important to me now than it was when I was actually there living in the neighborhood, living there in the area. So I wanted to ask you a question about living in the West End, working in the West End, and some of your work centering around the story of the people in the West End. What do you love about being in the West End community?

Melissa Alexander:

Man. It's kind of hard to ask. I always tell people ... If I had a iteration of that question, I always tell people that West End is not very large. It's not even ... If someone comes here from a different place and they say, "Where's the best place to go?", I can't even really tell you that. Because West End is a feeling. West End is a place that you allow happen to you. It's not like New York where you say go to the Empire State Building. Go to The Guggenheim. Go to the Statue of Liberty. It's not like that. It's you sit down. One of my favorite things to do is to just sit down on a really nice spring day and let it happen to me. I found myself in different conversations that I know for a fact that I would not be able to have in another part of town.

Melissa Alexander:

I know that there's a love here. And so when I was taking pictures ... Because I said when I started out doing street photography, I was taking pictures of just everyone. And I felt good about it. But the longer I did it, the more I felt like I was taking away. I felt like I wasn't giving back enough. I'm like, "I'm taking these pictures of these people, they don't know I'm taking the pictures and then I turn around and I put the picture in an art show and then I'm getting money off of their image. Am I any different?"

Melissa Alexander:

And so I was asking myself that. [ Crosstalk 00:18:03] when I took a picture of these two boys. It was during the Malcolm X festival one year. And it was these two boys. We had gotten rained on and everybody ran for cover in the ... They ran for cover in the basketball court, which has a top to it. And everyone's grouped together. But I saw these two boys and one of them was maybe about ... The older one was maybe about six and the younger one was about three. And the three year old was clutching ... The six year old had the three year old in his hands and he was clutching him. They were holding onto each other because there was no one else around to look at them, to worry about them. I had seen them in the neighborhood and I took a picture of them. And in that moment, I said to myself, "What is separating me right now? I'm putting my camera before my heart."

Melissa Alexander:

So I took the picture and immediately walked over and saw about their welfare and was like, "Where's your sister at?" Because like I said, I know them. But I was like, "Where's your sister at? Where's your mom? Are you okay? Stay with me until your sister comes. Until she finds you. Just stay with me." And that's what they did. But in that moment I realized that I couldn't do that anymore. I couldn't ... Being a street photographer probably wasn't going to be my calling in the long run. And so when I go to create art and things like that, I try to keep it in my neighborhood. As specifically as creating a short film called To West End With Love. Because I wanted to create a visual love letter to my community. I wanted them to know that I see you. It also serves as a visual time capsule so that when ... It's inevitable. Change is inevitable.

Melissa Alexander:

When West End does change ... Hopefully it doesn't change too much. But when it does change, anyone could go back to my film and see what West End looked like and what it felt like and how simple it could be to just maybe visit Tassili's with her long lines or to go to Yasin's or to dance in front of the Shrine of the Black Madonna or wait for a Marta bus to come by. So I still find my inspiration here, but just in a different way. In a different way. In a way that is much more authentic to who I am as a mom, as a black woman, as a lover of my people. I realized that I had to shift my perspective a little bit. And honestly, once I did that, I started tapping in even more and it helped me. It helped me.

Amena Brown:

I think that it is so wonderful that early on in your work this idea of what does it mean to have integrity in photography and just what does it mean for us to have integrity as artists, as the people who are doing the storytelling in whatever medium we do that and how do we gauge the truth and the honor of how we tell those stories and how do we decide what of those stories are ours to tell? And I think there's a lot of honor and humility and power in that. In knowing the difference or in knowing what feels the most true and honest to you. So kudos to you for that because obviously we have had many situations that we have looked at with photographers and writers and just different artists that sort of take it upon themselves to portray certain types of stories and you're like, wait a minute. This is not even for you to be telling.

Melissa Alexander:

Right. The things that resonate with me most are the things where I see myself or I see someone I know. And it's very easy to tell when someone is just like, "Oh, this is the hood so this is going to get me views." Or whatever it is. But what's the story? What's the real story here? What is the ... Yeah, you're going to show me the woman maybe standing on the street corner or whatever it is but did you know that her child attends this particular school and this child does this and the mom helps out with that? It's just, there's layers. There's layers. And again, if you just sit down and just wait, you'll hear the stories. You'll see the stories unfold right before your eyes. And what a blessing it is to witness and to be able to be in it and to sometimes connect with those stories.

Melissa Alexander:

Again, I don't know that this doesn't happen on another side of town. To me though, I don't feel it. You know what I'm saying? And it's not just because my skin color is different. It's just that I don't feel it. I don't see it. I see people walk over each other. I see people walk over homeless folks. Just yesterday my daughter and I were walking down Ralph David Abernathy and we walked past this one homeless woman that we see. She's the neighborhood ... We know her. And I had offered some ... You know those hot pads? Those pads that you can heat up or they heat up and then you could stick them in your pocket. I had gotten a pack of them so that when I saw her, I could give them to her. Because it was really, really cold out. I can't give her everything I would like to give her but this is something.

Melissa Alexander:

And so I offered the whole bag to her and she was like, "No, I don't want it." And I was like, "Okay. That's no problem." Put them in the house. When I walked past her yesterday, I said, "Hey Jackie." And she said, "Hey. Hey, by the way, do you still have those things I have to shake and put them in my pocket?" I said, "Yeah, I got them." She said, "Okay, cool. Well, can I come by later?" I said, "Yeah. The next time I see you, the next time you walk by, I'll have that bag for you." Because again, that's what a neighbor does. And even though she doesn't maybe have a house or ... I don't know her situation. She's still my neighbor though. And we look out for each other. Yeah. My art has to reflect that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, that idea of neighbor is so powerful. And whether we decide it intentionally or not, how we make our art will reflect who we think is our neighbor and how we think we are supposed to walk alongside them in life. It's really interesting to think about, but also it feels very much like a charge to me inside of myself as an artist. I really want my work to reflect that and it is possible to be intentional about that in the lives we live and in the things we make.

Melissa Alexander:

Absolutely.

Amena Brown:

Speaking of the things that you've made, I would love for you to tell us who and or what is Phyllis Iller?

Melissa Alexander:

You know what, my nickname was Phyllis for many years prior to Phyllis Iller coming about. And it started on a night where my friends and I were a little lifted. We'd been drinking and hanging out and laughing. It was really late. So everything becomes funnier after 2:00 AM. So a friend of ours was telling this story about ... I don't know. She just kept saying, Phyllis did this and Phyllis did that. And she had a really heavy Brooklyn accent so she was like, "Phyllis was going crazy." And I was like, "Yo, that's wild." And then afterwards I realized, I was like, "Yo, I don't know no Phyllis." So I was like, "Yo, who is Phyllis?" And it turns out that my friend Cici had been talking about a cat named Fearless.

Melissa Alexander:

And I was like ... So ever since then, my homeboy Mo would call me Phyllis. And he'd be like, "Yo Phyllis." And it was just ... It just kind of stuck. But he would call me these different names with Phyllis. So like it would be Phyllista Flockhart or Phyllissa Milano or all these different things. And one day he called me Phyllis Iller. And I still have a screenshot of that Facebook comment that he made. And I remember saying to him, "I'm going to use that." And then I used it. And I'm just waiting to get enough money up so that I could pay him for that name and I don't have to worry about him coming after me-

Amena Brown:

Right. That part.

Melissa Alexander:

Because he did come up with it, but I'm always very vocal about where it came from. And so Phyllis Iller obviously is a play on Phyllis Diller. This has nothing to do with Phyllis Diller the comedian. But this has everything to do with ... It has everything to do with the around the way girl. The woman who is most authentic. What does it look like when the around the way girl grows into a woman? That's the land that I deal with. She has children. She has a career. What does her career look like? Has she embraced her vulnerability? Has she embraced herself as a woman? What is she like as a mom? What is she like as a lover? As a wife, as a girlfriend? Those are the things that interest me because that's often where I'm at.

Melissa Alexander:

But even more than that, she takes care of herself. She takes care of her family. She takes care of her community. She gives and she receives and she grows. She believes in sisterhood. So a lot of the things that Phyllis Iller has become are the very things that people see in my work. So people will say, "I feel like that know everyone that you take a picture of, but I've never met them before." I'm like, "That's because you're seeing a reflection of you." So as a brand, I always like to think that my interest in gang culture in the 1970s in New York will rear its head one day. But right now where it's at in this moment, Phyllis Iller is for anyone who seeks to embrace themselves. Their most authentic selves.

Amena Brown:

That's so powerful. And hearing you describe it and thinking of so many of the images that you've taken that I have loved and some of the images you've taken of people that some of them I know personally or professionally. Worked with them in the past. Some of them I just know because I knew of them, but had never seen a photo of them like what you took of them. And so it's really beautiful to hear you describing some of your inner process and the inner motivation behind why you do what you do and the space you're hoping to create for the person on the other side of that camera as well.

Melissa Alexander:

I'm an empathetic person. I'm always willing to see another point of view for the most part. I mean, sometimes I could be stubborn but it doesn't usually to come with how I relate to people. It's more like things to myself that I'm stubborn. But I always seek to help. And what's funny is that ... Let me ask you this. Do you have an app called The Pattern?

Amena Brown:

No. Tell me more.

Melissa Alexander:

So the Pattern will tell you ... It'll tell you about yourself. It'll tell you the patterns that you have in your life. You do put your birth chart stuff in. So it is technically based on that, but it never mentions your sign or your rising sign or your moon or your mercury or any of that stuff. It never mentions that. It just tells you that, okay, judging from this information, you might be a person who exhibits this type of pattern. And so it told me ... It's so funny. An app told me. But The Pattern told me that as you've gone throughout life, one of the biggest things that makes you feel alive is when you are diving into your work and when you're helping others. And I was like, yo, that's really true. It took an app to tell me that, maybe.

Melissa Alexander:

But it is what I always felt in my heart. And so when I have a session with someone we're sitting down and it's just me and them and we're dreaming together and we're talking about what makes them tick and we're letting go. And I'm helping them shed those agreements that they made where they said that, "Oh, my eyes are too far apart. Oh, my forehead is big. Oh, my arms are too big. Oh, I don't like my stomach. Oh, I don't like ..." All these things that they tell themselves that they don't like, I take it to focus on what they do like and I breathe life into them. And I say, "Oh my God, you may not like your eyes, but this smile is killing me right now. Let's get some more of this smile."

Melissa Alexander:

Or, "I love when you raise your head like that. Keep your head up. You are a queen, you are a king. Don't lower your head for anyone. You're proud to be who you are." These are the things I'm speaking into them because I know what it's like to not have those things spoken into you. And so if I can give in an hour session, in a 20 minute session ... Shoot, some of my sessions are only 15 minutes. You know what I'm saying? For headshots. But in those 15 minutes, if I can make you walk out feeling better than when you walked in, then my job is complete. The photos are the icing on the cake. The photos are the cherry on top. We're going to get good photos. Don't worry about that. But what is the work that I can help you do on your inner self? That's what I really care about.

Melissa Alexander:

And so I kind of take photography to be a ... Yes, it is a means to an end. It does help me to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly and clothes on my daughter's back and all of that. And I am so thankful. So thankful. Every day I'm thankful that I get to do something that I love. However, at the end of the day, I know that I'm affecting lives in a positive manner and that's what really keeps me going in those days when ... Or those months. I'm freelance so every month is not the same.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Melissa Alexander:

You know what I mean? I know you know. So it's like when there's a light month, that's when I really have to hold onto my why. I really have to hold onto the fact that I've been called to do this. This is my calling. To enhance the lives of others through the love that I have for them just off of GP. Don't cross me, but-

Amena Brown:

Right, right.

Melissa Alexander:

Don't cross me. But even then I'm still able to say, "Well, what happened in your life to make you feel like you had to do something like that?" I may not want to be around you, but I'll forgive because life is just too short to be dwelling on the things you don't like about yourself. Everybody's different and that's our superpower.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. One of the things I love about your work too, is you have this special and specific way that you are capturing what it means to be Black. Whether that's the love, the joy, the childhood, the playfulness, the softness. What is your process of how you decided to approach that as a photographer? As I've seen in your work sometimes those are family photos. Sometimes they may be artist photos or they could be just anybody that's decided they want to have some photos taken. Talk to me more about that.

Melissa Alexander:

It's kind of like society spins a narrative about Black and brown people. I've charged myself with the task of dispelling that. And you had mentioned Blackness before. I've come to realize that Blackness is not a response to anything. It simply is.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Melissa Alexander:

Right?

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Melissa Alexander:

And so with that being said, I'm going to document our joys. I'm going to document our wins. I'm going to document our tragedies. I'm going to document when maybe we're not as strong. But even in documenting that we're still together and we still have each other's back. And that's the thing that gives me joy. Seeing us together. And usually in whatever manner. Obviously not anything too negative. But Blackness is ... It's the ... How can I put it? There's a scene ... I watch a lot of the movies. There's a scene in this movie called Wattstax where ... And Wattstax was like a ... Stax Records went to Watts in LA and did a concert. And in this documentary they interview some very, just regular folks. And there's this one woman who I can never get out of my head, but she says Black is beautiful because it feels so good. And that right there, that right there is it. Period. It feels good. We have a light and a spark within us that can't be found nowhere else. We are resilient. We are loving. We are ... I don't know if we cursed on this.

Amena Brown:

You're allowed. We're allowed.

Melissa Alexander:

Oh we the shit. You know what I'm saying?

Amena Brown:

Yes. Yes. Accurate, accurate.

Melissa Alexander:

And like I said, it's a blessing that I get to document this beautiful Blackness three to four times a week. This is what I get to do. This is what I'm called to do. This is when people reach out to me and they say, "I love the way you capture Black women. I love the way you capture Black men. I love the way you capture Black children." Because if I don't do it, someone else may do it, but they may not do it like how I do. If I don't do it, someone may take our narrative and spin it in a completely different way. And Zora Neale Hurston said ... I'm paraphrasing but she said, "If you take it, but you don't say anything, they'll say that you loved it."

Amena Brown:

Right. Right.

Melissa Alexander:

And I love Zora Neale Hurston. And so I was like, "Well, look, if mama Hurston said that, then I'm going to tell them when I don't like something." And I don't like how sometimes we're represented in the media. Now, of course we're on a high. We got all these different celebrities that are just really Black. I'm rooting for everyone black. And now I love that we can say that with pride and that's a complete sentence. And that's a complete sentence. But on a regular man, I don't have quite the reach yet that a Issa Rae or Regina King or anybody like that has, but where I can affect it, I'm going to. And that's the joy. That's the joy right there.

Amena Brown:

You have been a full-time artist for ... It's been some years for you now.

Melissa Alexander:

I've been a full-time artist since October 16th, 2017.

Amena Brown:

Wow. What makes you know the exact date?

Melissa Alexander:

Because ... I know, right? When I was turning 31 I think and my birthday's October 13th. And so it was on a Friday that year. And I had just an amazing weekend. At the time I was working at State Farm doing like ... If somebody got an accident, I was the person they would talk to. "Thanks for calling State Farm. This is Melissa. How may I help you?"

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

I hated it. I hated it. I hated corporate. I hated corporate. I really hated corporate because they didn't really care about me or my daughter. It'd be things like, I told them ... I was the very candid about my situation. I'm like, "Hey, look, I'm a single mom and my daughter has the flu. I can't come in." They'd be like, "Wow. We're really sorry to hear that but it's going to count. It's going to count as a no show." And I'm like, "But my daughter's sick. She has a 105 fever." "Oh, wow. I know. It's going around. It's crazy isn't it? But it's still going to count."

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

Realized that they didn't care about me. And after that birthday weekend of being loved so hard by my friends, by my family, I walked into work that Monday morning and I got there ... My shift started a little bit earlier than the rest of my team. And I remember walking down the aisle to my little desk and I looked at that phone and I was like, "I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore." And I gathered my things. I gathered all the good pens.

Amena Brown:

As you should. As you should.

Melissa Alexander:

I gathered all the pens. Got all the good notebooks. And I went back downstairs and I took my badge off and I handed it to the guard. And they looked at me and they were like, "What's this for?" And I was like, "I quit. I'm not coming back." And she looked at me and she said, "Dang, you're the fourth person this week."

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

And so when she said that, I was like, "Oh, well, hey, I guess I'm lucky number four because I'm out." And I left. And I called my homegirl who was also an entrepreneur. My friend Anita. She's the caterer. Well, at the time she was a caterer. She's was starting to take her business ... I called her, I said, "Girl, I left." And she said, "What?" I was like, "I left." She was like, "You left where?" I was like, "I left State Farm." And she was like, "Girl, look, I'm at the Goodwill in the West End. Meet me here." And so we were walking down the aisles of Goodwill and I remember looking across at her and she was like, "How do you feel?" And I was like, "I feel fantastic. I feel like everything is possible now."

Melissa Alexander:

And then a couple days later, I was on my back porch talking to my best friend, Nika. And I said, "Nika, what did I do? I don't have no money saved up. I have one more check coming from State Farm but after that I'm on my own. What do I do?" And she was like, "Girl, look, I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. You done left every two weeks you get a check. You done left healthcare. You've left dental care. You've left all of this stuff. Security. You've left security for something that you don't know is going to work. What are you doing? You didn't struggle all these years leading up to this." She was like, "Think about when you cooked that meal for your daughter and she was still hungry but there was no more left so you gave it to her off your plate." She was like, "Think about that." And I told her, I said, "I am thinking about that."

Amena Brown:

Right, right.

Melissa Alexander:

I am thinking about that. And that is what I have always kept in my mind. I've never seen ... There was fear, but I let that fear drive me. I didn't let the fear get to me. I used fear. I used fear to propel myself. And I said, "Okay, well, look, it's October. I'll give myself until ... Let's see about March. Let's see what happens in March." So that was the middle of October. By the middle of November, I was feeling the crunch and I was like, "Holy crap. What am I going to do?" I'm having these sales. I'm doing all sorts of stuff to generate money. And then I got a phone call from my friend Makeba at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. And she was like, "I've seen your work. We have this exhibit coming. Would you like to do portraits at the museum? We'll pay you this." I was like ... She was like, "Is your schedule open for it?" I was like, "It is."

Amena Brown:

Yeah. It will be if it wasn't.

Melissa Alexander:

I was like, "Let me look." And I was like, "You know what? It's funny. It is open." A week later I had a friend reach out to me. My friend Carlton. He's a professor at Emory, but he also runs Beautiful In Every Shade and Black Men Smile and stuff. So Carlton reached out to me and said, "Hey, look, I got this class and we need an artist to come in and mentor with these students with a nonprofit. We're going to work with a nonprofit as well as a group of students and create some kind of content for the nonprofit." He said, "Are you available?" I said, "Let me check my schedule. I think I am available."

Melissa Alexander:

And little things just started like that. It was just coming and coming and coming to me. When March came, I realized ... It was the middle of March and I realized I haven't even looked for a job.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

Because I was so in my zone of I will win. I will win. And I didn't see any other option. I said to myself that, "Why can't I have the life where I can go to my daughter's field trips, but also still make money? Why can't I go on trips to other places and still make money? Why can't I be comfortable and live the life that I would like to live? I don't feel like I should have to be relegated to a job that I hate for the next 40 years until I retire. That's not the way I want to live."

Melissa Alexander:

And so I made the decision that I wasn't going to live that way. And again, there's been some hiccups here and there. [crosstalk 00:43:37].

Amena Brown:

Right. For sure.

Melissa Alexander:

I'm like, "Wait a minute now. Maybe I should look for a job or maybe I should look for a part-time." But every ... Amena, seriously, even to today, today I woke up and I was like, "Golly, what am I going to do? I done paid my bills, but that doesn't leave much left over." And then I had someone reach out and say, "Oh, you need your deposit right now? That's no problem. How much is it? 50? Okay, no problem. 50%, boom. Here it is." Things come through like that when I feel my most lost. The universe comes back and says, but I got you. Just trust me. And so I do. And that is how I have accomplished what I have accomplished in the way that I have accomplished it.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's inspiring to hear how when we decide to open up our hands in a way ... And I'm saying this, like I'm preaching to myself when I say it, because I'm a person who on the one side loves to make plans. I love to have a thousand plans for a thousand things I'm going to do. But a lot of the amazing things that have happened in my life happened in a moment where I just went, this is what I want right here. And I just had this moment where I was opening my hands to let's see how it goes. And there was something of a path that sort of rose up to meet me in this way. And I totally hear that theme in your story of transitioning into being a full-time artist. That there's this way almost leaving one thing can put us to arriving at the very thing that we're supposed to be doing in that season of our life, which is like you said, scary.

Amena Brown:

I totally remember that. I worked corporate. Worked for a corporation here. I hated it so bad.

Melissa Alexander:

I know girl.

Amena Brown:

I hated it so bad.

Melissa Alexander:

Girl, I know. I know.

Amena Brown:

At the beginning, it was going to be like my dream job because they were hiring writers. And I was like, "When would a company ever be hiring writers? Oh, I'm so excited about it." Six months in, I was like, someone please save me from this. And I'll tell you what's interesting. I'm not a mom, but I'll tell you the moment that made me go, I got to leave here. There was a woman that I worked with ... She was ... I was sort of an entry level position. So she was a manager. She was a couple of ... Probably more than a couple of positions above me. One of the few black women managers actually where I worked. And she got pregnant later in her life. I want to say she was in her late 30s, early 40s. And it changed her. Before she had her child, she was all about whatever these corporate initiatives, whatever goals y'all got, how I can help y'all achieve it. Great. She was all about that.

Amena Brown:

And she had her child and her whole priorities ... I just watched in her womanhood ... Her womanhood was just shifting all over the place and it wasn't that her career or her work wasn't important to her, but she was like, "I don't want to be emailing you at 6:00 at night. I want to be with my family. And I don't want to be thinking about these strategic objectives on a Saturday because I want to be with my family." And I watched her get a lot of resistance to that. And sort of this implication that because she was choosing to step back from what would typically be hours you don't work at this job. She's wanting to pull back after five and on the weekend. She was like, "I can give you this work. When I'm here sitting in this office, I'll give you this work. But after five and on the weekends, I want that time back to myself."

Melissa Alexander:

That's right.

Amena Brown:

And she got a lot of resistance to that. And it was very hard for her, that transition. And I'm in my mid 20s watching this happen to her. And I just remember filing that away and going, I don't want you to get to decide my womanhood journey or my motherhood journey or however that unfolds with me. I don't want you to get to choose what I do to take care of myself, to care for my family or however that looks for me. And that was the first time that I thought to myself, then I need to do this thing I love full time.

Melissa Alexander:

Yes ma'am.

Amena Brown:

It scared me to death. And I still had several mornings that first year, year and a half where I would wake up out of my sleep and be like, "What am I doing? What is you doing? You don't have nobody to tell you what to do. What are you doing?" Oh man, all the freak outs. All the went broke. Experienced so many things and still, I am like ... And I love it. Even on the days-

Melissa Alexander:

But I was just about to say that. I was just about to say that even with that craziness, that range of emotions, is that still not better-

Amena Brown:

Than how I felt Sunday night going to that job? Look.

Melissa Alexander:

Yes. You feel me?

Amena Brown:

Look.

Melissa Alexander:

That is so much better. I want to phrase this in a certain way so that the universe is like, oh, okay, well you would rather ... Well then you going to feel that all the time. No, no, no, no. I enjoy the range of emotions. I accept the process of the range of emotions that we feel as entrepreneurs. Me being a photographer, you being a podcaster. All of these things that you do. Writer. All of these things that you do. But that's still so much better than walking into a place where it's stale and you know the smiles that you see are not real. And you know that people will throw you under the bus because it'll help them get further. And you have someone looking at you saying, "You cannot eat until 2:00."

Amena Brown:

That part. That part.

Melissa Alexander:

Things like that. Things like that. No I'm going to eat whenever I want to. That's why when we initially started talking, you were like, "What did you have for breakfast today?" I'm like, "I had coffee because that's what I wanted to have." I don't want anyone telling me when I can and cannot do in the way that I cannot do it. Now granted, you do have to learn a level of ... I mean, this is not for the faint of heart, what we do. It really isn't. Because you have to have a level of discipline. And so what I learned to do was take some of the structure that I did learn in the corporate world, I learned to apply that to myself so that it's like, "Okay, Melissa, between the hours of eight and 11, you need to be working. And then at 11 you can take an hour, hour and a half break. Maybe catch up on some Netflix show. Whatever it is. And then you need to get back to work. And then when your daughter comes home at three o'clock, you got some time with her."

Melissa Alexander:

There does need to be a level of structure. Do I adhere to that every day? No. But the point is that our time is our own and we don't have someone breathing down our necks saying, "When is this done? When are you going to do this? And you need to be here at this time. And I don't care if you have a child. I don't care if you have a family. I don't care if it's your anniversary. I don't care if it's your birthday. I don't care if you're sick. You need to do what we say to do, because guess what? We're paying you."

Amena Brown:

Right.

Melissa Alexander:

And when something as simple as money ... Something that you don't even see on a regular basis ... Something that you could just send to someone if you open an app like Cash App, "Oh hey, I just sent you a thousand dollars. Really? Where did it go? I didn't even see it." When something as crazy as the idea of money is the thing that keeps you depressed, is the thing that holds you to a job that makes you feel inadequate, it holds you to a job that makes you feel like you don't have time for your family or that you're missing ... I realized that I was seeing my daughter ... Monday through Friday, I was seeing her a total of 10 hours a week.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Melissa Alexander:

You feel what I'm saying? Because the morning commute, the coming home commute, then dinner and then bed. She was spending more time in after school than I would've cared to. I mean, she still goes to after school if I have something going on, but after school is an option now.

Amena Brown:

Right, right.

Melissa Alexander:

So you really have to just ... I would say anybody who's listening, you really have to think about what is most important to you and find your passion. It sounds like you love to write and you love this communication. You love communication. You've found a way to make it work for you.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Melissa Alexander:

Right. I love connecting with people. I found a way to make it work with me. I mean, honestly what I do is still no different than what I was doing when I was working on the phone. I'm still helping people.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Melissa Alexander:

It's no different. It's no different.

Amena Brown:

So true.

Melissa Alexander:

It's just I chose to find a different way to do it.

Amena Brown:

It's so true. It's so true. I mean, I worked on the phones, customer service for a company here too. And my husband and I joke all the time because we both had separate ... We worked for different companies but both had experience in customer service. And I was like, you will not believe the amount of times I recall back those lessons in this line of work, because you could be working with a client, you could be partnering with a company or whatever. You have all these different sort of work relationships that require the type of finesse that you had to learn being on the phones with people who may be in a highly emotional situation. They may be angry. They have all sorts of things going on and you have to try to get information out of them, information to them while you're trying to keep things from hopefully escalating to a point where nobody can understand each other. So it is interesting how even all the things that you do that may not have been the thing you feel called to do, you can pick all these lessons from that and all of that plays a role in the type of business owner and entrepreneur that you've become. I love that.

Melissa Alexander:

Oh yes. It all comes full circle really. At the end of the day it all comes full circle and you sit back and you say, dang. For example, me wanting to be a art historian. The very masters that I studied are the ones who are still showing up in my work. It's a story. It's a never ending story. I just watched that with my daughter for the first time a couple weeks ago and she was blown away.

Amena Brown:

Oh man.

Melissa Alexander:

She was blown away by that. I was like, "Yeah, girl, this is the kind of content we had when we were kids."

Amena Brown:

Come on content. I can only imagine someone your daughter's age going back and watching that now. As far as some things have advanced more and the effects of the CGI or whatever.

Melissa Alexander:

Absolutely. Absolutely. But look, here's the thing though. Her mouth was stuck open. Remember the part where Atreyu was going through the swamp of sadness with our Artax and the horse gets stuck and he's pulling him and all of a stuff. I mean, I felt something, but it was probably my inner eight year old coming out again. But I looked at my daughter, who's 10. I looked at her face and her mouth was just hanging open. And she was like, "Mama, what's going to happen to the horse?"

Amena Brown:

Oh my gosh.

Melissa Alexander:

And I was like, "You got to watch. You got to watch and see." But it is a never ending in story. It's like our story is just being continually written and if we're not looking at those past chapters we may not really know where we're going to end up. But there's still a common thread and the common thread is us. And as we grow and as we get better and as we get to know ourselves even more ... Again, this is why I say that vulnerability is so important. Because you have to be open and vulnerable in order to really grow.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Melissa Alexander:

And when you see that growth, you're like, "Oh my god, I opened myself up to fear. I opened myself up to failure. Possible failure. But look at that. Here I am. I'm still here. It's, Miss Celie all over again. I may be Black and I may be ugly, but I'm here."

Amena Brown:

But I'm here. Come on Miss Celie. It's always a lesson right there.

Amena Brown:

So good always to hear from Melissa and to be inspired by her work. Since this recording Melissa's work has included documentaries and art activations of her provocative and poignant photography, centering Black women and Black girlhood. To check out and support Melissa's work, make sure you visit her website phyllisiller.com. See you next week.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 60

 Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown. I took a break for the holidays and I hope you got to take a break too. And welcome to 2022. I don't know if you also feel a little shy or reticent. If I want to bring a spelling bee word into our conversation. Feel a little reticent this year about whatever your normal beginning of the year rituals are. Many years ago, I used to be a person that would do all of the goal setting. I had different questions I'd ask myself about the year prior, and then I had a different set of things that I would use as my sort of goal setting for the next year. And then... Hey mom. Some shitty things happened. And when those things happened, it was sort of like my ability to goalset kept changing and changing and becoming less and less defined in a certain way. So I went from being a super goal setting person to then becoming a person that did vision boards.

 Amena Brown:

And I had read an article by Martha Beck several years ago, where she talked about intuitive vision boards. Because I started out basically taking my goal setting that I was doing in my journal or whatever, and bringing that over into vision boarding, which basically meant I was looking through magazines for very specific pictures of things and lines and words and different things to sort of make a visual representation of what I would've written down as my goals. Right? Okay. Well, then some other shitty things happened. Which sometimes after those things happen, you do have a period where you can have a little moment of a laugh, like, "Ooh, that was actually really terrible. And I made it through that." But I think I ended up having some really hard things happen that were connected very much to the things I put on my literal vision board.

 Amena Brown:

And then after that year, I remember a very particular year that it was painful to look back at my vision board because of how some things had happened that year. So then I decided after reading Martha Beck's article about intuitive vision boarding, which would basically be like you look through magazines or whatever you're using as your fodder for what's going to become your vision board. And she would say, look through the magazine and just pick out the words or images that you feel drawn to. And so far that has been my favorite way of vision boarding when I did that. However, when we came into 2020, and I think by the time I got to 2020, you can tell that some harder are things happened in life. Right? Because then I went from intuitive vision boarding to just picking one word for the year. And I don't remember what my word was for 2019, but my word for 2020 was surprise.

 Amena Brown:

And I'll tell you all, 2020 surprised all of us in some ways that we did not want to be surprised. So going into 2021, I really don't remember if I did any sort of goal setting rituals. I don't remember if I did that. I know I didn't do a vision board. And I don't know that I had a word because I normally remember the word. So, I feel like 2021 was just like, "well, I'm here." So I don't know what my 2022 energy is yet. I'm still figuring that out. Maybe you are too. But I had an episode idea that came to me. I believe it was either 2021 or in 2020. And I wanted to talk to you all about how to survive a creative block, but you all, I was so emotional about it and my assistant and I, we meet and we talk over a lot of these episodes and my husband's my producer. So we talk over a lot of the episodes.

 Amena Brown:

And this was one episode idea that every time I would approach the time that I said I was going to do it, I would get so teary that I just knew it wasn't time, it wasn't time, it wasn't time. As I was thinking about what's going to be the episode to open up this year for our living room. This episode idea came back to me. And for the first time I didn't feel like totally ugly crying when I thought about it. And so I thought, "Well, maybe this episode is ready now." So I thought as we are beginning the year and shout out to my recovering perfectionist out there, trying your very best not to give yourself 10,000 things to do in a year that only has 52 weeks. Right? I want to talk about what do we do when we find ourselves in a creative block and many of you are probably familiar with the term writer's block. Right?

 Amena Brown:

So I want you to know I'm taking writer's block and broadening it so that it also applies to you, whether you are a writer or not. It could apply to whatever creative work you may find yourself doing. But creative block is very real. And I have been in one for a very long time. I have been in one more than once in my life. I'm sure I will experience it again. And so I thought I wanted to give you a few tips on how to possibly navigate that. So I want to talk about some caveats first, because it is the beginning of the year. This can be a time that we take our goals and our things that we are trying to achieve for the year and a venture to say a lot of the time we are potentially setting ourselves up for the fall by having too many things to accomplish or having things to accomplish that we've given ourselves not enough time to actually have an opportunity to do.

 Amena Brown:

So, I want you to know that that will not be the spirit of this episode. The spirit of this episode is to come up with some ways that can be helpful to you without you feeling like you have been beat upon emotionally. Couple of caveats I want to give you. Caveat number one is we're still in a pandemic. And I want to give a shout out to my friend Leigh because there are a lot of times that I talk with her because she knows that I'm a recovering perfectionist. There are a lot of times I talk with her that she has to literally say that sentence to me. And we are also in the middle of a pandemic. So she'll say to me, whatever you did do or did get accomplished is good and is worthy of celebration. No matter what you had in your mind that you thought you could complete or finish because being in a pandemic, whether we talk about it a lot, whether we return back to normal in certain ways, it still affects us. It affects our ability to complete certain task.

 Amena Brown:

It affects our rhythm of life. It affects us in a lot of ways that we may stop talking about because it's been going on so long and we're just trying to find ways to sort of move past it or whatever. But I do want to give us a reminder here that it is January 2022, and we are still in a pandemic almost two years now. So that is my one caveat that when we're talking about what we do about creative block, one of the first things we're going to do is give grace to ourselves and acknowledge the external circumstances that may be at play. Right? That may also affect our internal creative processes. And my other caveat is I really want this episode and our time in the living room today to be about how we can enter the new year gently.

 Amena Brown:

This is a rhythm that has not been natural to me. It's not something that I would have done 10 years ago or five years ago, but the last two or three years of my life have taught me more about what it means to have a gentle rhythm. And so I have chosen to come into 2022 gently. And what does that mean? I mean, as we talk about these things, inevitably, we're going to get into conversations about productivity and all this stuff. As we delve into that, I want you to think about how you can and be gentle with yourself as the new year is starting. This is not a time for you to beat yourself up about the things that you didn't get done last year and now you need to dump those things on yourself now at the beginning of the year. This is not a time to speak negatively about the body that you are in and all of whatever other assundry goals you may feel like you need to have because you are underneath it all being mean to the body that you have. Right?

 Amena Brown:

This is a time to be gentle with ourselves physically, emotionally, creatively in all the ways we can. So, I want you to think about that as we're talking about creative block and our creative processes, how can you enter the new year gently? I know we have a lot of ideas about hit the ground running and going to kill these goals and murder them. I don't know why we have to be violent to our goals, but anyways just what are some ways you can take a walk into the life that you want for yourself? Right? Okay. So how did this idea come to me to want to talk to you about this on an episode? So this started out with a tweet and I tweeted a while ago, how do you return to the love of writing? And I don't tweet very often, but I was just very curious about this and I was curious to hear about it from other writers.

 Amena Brown:

And I got a mixed bag of responses as would be expected on Twitter. So, some people had a lot of really wonderful tips to give, different things that they do to sort of keep themselves inspired. And of course, inevitably there were some answers in the thread and from people that quote tweeted the thread with their responses. There were some answers in the thread that started giving me some sort of visceral, like, I couldn't tell what my deal was. I was like, I don't know if I'm like... I feel like I'm kind of angry a little bit. And then I kind of feel like I could cry. And so then I got off Twitter and started to process this with my husband. And of course, started to ball my eyes out. Just cry, cry, cry, because I think a lot emotionally for me was underneath that question.

 Amena Brown:

And of course, as we know about social media, people on social media are most of the time not thinking about what could be bringing you to ask about these things or they're not thinking about how they could be tender with you or be mindful of you. They're just taking what you've asked at face value and answering based on their own perspectives. Right? And I realized first of all, the part that was starting to make me feel enraged, the pandemic has also brought me that more of a sense of rage. But the part that was making me feel enraged was I felt rooted in some misconceptions about writing, about creative work and creative works relationship to the term discipline. Right? So there were some people that were like, "Well, sometimes you just need to take a break from writing." I go on a walk, I go talk with someone I love, I do these things.

 Amena Brown:

And then it was like the other half of the thread or the timeline was like, "You don't need to be really getting into all this emotional stuff, you just need to go write. You just need to go do that." And I want to tell you all a side story without name dropping. I don't want nobody really trying to get involved with what I say about them on this podcast. So I'll just tell you a very well known New York Times best selling white male author. I was at a conference with him many years ago and he said to me, now I will admit to you that I had an author crush on him at the time. I loved his books and I'm sure some of you may know who it is, but I'm not telling you unless you have my actual cell phone number. Anyways.

 Amena Brown:

So I loved his books. And there was just a lot about what he wrote that I really loved and felt represented some things about our generation. And I don't know, he was a big deal to me at the time. He was a big deal to a lot of folks at the time. And I had this opportunity to be in a green room with him at a conference. And I thought, well, I'm here with him I should ask him some writing advice. And so I asked him whatever my quintessential writing question was. And he said, "Well, you need to treat writing the same way that a plumber treats his work." He was like, if a plumber gets a job, they just go there and do the plumbing every day. It's not an emotional act for them. They just go and they work on the pipes, they do whatever's required for the job and they leave.

 Amena Brown:

He was like, "You'll be more successful approaching, writing like that." And for many years, you all I tried to follow his advice. And now I think that that is very bad advice. Or I guess I should say, I don't think that advice is for everybody, maybe for some people that works, but I am a person whose creative work is very much attached to my emotions and feelings. And to the extent that I start detaching my emotions and feelings from my creative work, then it's not going to feel like me and it's not going to feel true and it's not going to authentic. Right? And he was also a writer that was one of those people that recommends that you go to a cabin and write. And that is always really laughable for me because I'm like, who in their regular life has in addition to their house, a cabin? Where am I going? In Vermont? What am I doing? Where is that happening? Right?

 Amena Brown:

So I think there are a lot of misconceptions to me about how creative work works. And I think there can be this tendency to sort of speak to, or speak about people who do creative work as if they are inherently lazy. And as all they do is procrastinate. Now, listen. Okay. Let's just start with the fact that I know creative people do procrastinate. Some of us might be lazy, right? But I do think that might be oversimplifying the situation. And I think that's not helping us care for our souls in the creative process, because for many of us, our souls are very attached to that. And it's our souls that help us make, that help us create things. So when we talk about the misconceptions between writing and discipline, I think the go-to answer whenever a creative person is like, "I'm having writer's block. I'm having a hard time getting my ideas out. What should I do?"

 Amena Brown:

It's like the go-to answer is always, well, you should do more. You should get up earlier. You should spend more hours. You should do all this long list of things. You should go to the mythical cabin. You should go to bed at 10 and wake up at 1:30 AM and write during that time. There are always these very wild and a lot of times for a lot of people, unsustainable ideas about how writing or creative work actually work. And I want to submit to you that I don't believe the answer to most problems that creative people have, is that you're not doing enough. Because a lot of us that do creative work have some sense of a belief inside that we are not enough or that we are always not doing enough, some of us. Right? And so for a lot of us who have those feelings already, we take in a lot of those ideas that I would consider to be sort of toxic productivity, right?

 Amena Brown:

That our worth or our worthiness as a person is in how much shit we get done and how quickly we do it and how early we woke up. And I think when you get too caught in that, you might be losing the soul of the process. And if you're listening to this and you're like, "That is my process. That's what gives me life," then that's what your process should be. I think the thing is creative process is different for each person. It can be different for the same person in different seasons of life. So we should have that sort of flexibility for how we approach what we're doing and what we do when we're having a hard time doing the thing that we love.

 Amena Brown:

So I want to talk about first of all, reasons that you may experience creative block. And I'm really digging under here are beyond the reasons that I said earlier, right? That people are like, "Oh, you're just not putting in enough time." You're not doing enough is basically the answer. I want to dig underneath there beyond those things. And the first thing, not that I am trying to bring sadness into the chat, but we do have to talk about it, is grief. And grief is a mini layered experience in our lives because there are a lot of things that can bring grief into our worlds. Right? It could be the loss of someone, it could be the loss of a relationship. It could be the loss of an opportunity. It can come up and pop up in so many different ways. And unresolved grief has been my creative block a lot of the time.

 Amena Brown:

And the thing is, if you're experiencing grief at this moment in your life, the reasoning that you need a cabin, that you need to be doing more, that you need to get up earlier, that you need to push yourself and put in more hours. None of that makes sense to the brain and soul and body that is experience grief. Grief will certainly become a creative block. I wish I could remember the thread or that I kept track of it, but there was a writer around the time that I had submitted my question. And I don't even think it was someone that I follow. I think it just showed up on my Twitter timeline because some other people that I follow had liked some posts on the thread, but someone who was a writer had posted that they had experienced a loss of a loved one and they asked people on Twitter that were writers after loss, how long did it take you to return to writing?

 Amena Brown:

And I went through the thread because I've experienced a lot of grief myself, some related to losing people that I loved, but some related to other just personal hard things that happened in life. Right? And reading through the thread was actually comforting to me in a way, because there were a lot of people on there, like, "Oh, it took me a year. It took me a year and a half to return to writing after losing a parent or losing a partner." Right? And I think it's interesting because when we are succumbing to the ideas of toxic productivity, we are being made to think that we should be getting over things pretty quickly, that we should be returning back to "normal." Right? And there are some things that we're going to experience or go through that will make us different and we should not expect ourselves to return immediately back to that normal.

 Amena Brown:

Another thing that I wanted to tell you all could be a reason why you may experience a creative block, which still, I feel like all these things I'm about to say have grief connected to them really. But the second thing I wanted to say is grappling with the fear of failure, the fear of success, or grappling with an experience of failure or an experience of success, which feels very wild, but is true. You can experience creative block because you did a creative project or worked on something creative and it didn't do well. And however that's defined, maybe it didn't numerically do well, maybe at your job it didn't receive the support that you thought it was going to receive, or whatever those things are. Right? It didn't happen the way we wanted it to. It wasn't celebrated the way we hoped it was going to be. Experiencing that can also cause creative block, because then you feel afraid as to if I have done my first art show, just as an example. You all know, I don't do visual art, but I'm just using this as an example.

 Amena Brown:

If I've done my first visual art show and none of the pieces sell and the reception wasn't that great and there weren't a lot of people who showed up to it, then my confidence in my work and in myself approaching my second time doing a showing, will be low and it will be hard sometimes for us as creative folks to conjure that up. And then sometimes it's really hard for us to dig into what did we feel disappointed about when we put out thing and it didn't do what we thought it was going to do. But if we're going to be able to move forward from having a creative block, we cannot leave these emotions and feelings and experiences unprocessed. Right? You could also be grappling with success. This has happened to me with few of my poems where I wrote a poem and it started doing really well. I was doing that poem in front of different stages earlier on in my career, recording this poem with different artists and just seeing people respond to it.

 Amena Brown:

And then when it came time for that season to change, and it was a season of writing, I had to get past those feelings of what if I never write a poem like that one again. And what if all the other poems I write are not as good as that? And we know that staying in that type of thought will totally keep you from being able to create, because now you are comparing yourself to your past self versus being able to come back to whatever your version of the blank page is with curiosity with this openness to see what will the you of today want to make versus what the you yesterday or two years ago, or whatever made. Also, I do want to talk about going through trauma or going through something that's so hard that you have entered into a survival mode.

 Amena Brown:

And I think this is really important also because for some of us, I know some people in my life that are caretakers of someone who is sick or is not well. And in order for them to take care of that person, they have to be in a survival mode. I know some people that have chronic diagnoses that they've received or have diagnoses that they've received that are going to involve a lot of difficult treatment, a lot of difficult meds. Right? That puts you in a place where you enter a survival mode, which means now so many other things start to feel like a luxury. Right? When you're in survival mode, you're just doing everything you can to make it through the day to make it through the week, to make it to the end of the month. And when you're in survival mode, yeah, it can be very hard to be creative during that time.

 Amena Brown:

And again, that's another time in your life that somebody telling you to go away to a cabin when you may be broke and you may not be able to afford to take some trip somewhere else so that you can have a break. You may literally be going through a time in your life that you're not going to have that break and you're not going to have another place that you can go to. Right? So I think it's important to speak to that because whenever we give sort of... And when I say we, I mean the people who have podcasts, have social media platforms. Whenever we "give advice to people" and we're like, "Oh, you just need to..." It's really never that simple. Right? And the last reason which seems simple, but I do think it's a factor is just pure exhaustion, not really having had time that you've rested, whether that means sleep or whether that means just time that you weren't having to pull on the part of yourself that your creativity would be coming from. Right? These are reasons you may be experiencing creative block.

 Amena Brown:

Okay. So what do you do when you experience creative block? And one of the things that I want to say to you that I think is so important is that you should remember that when you experience creative block, never forget that your healing is more important than your output. And the truth is, especially for those of us who also work in creative world, your clients are not necessarily going to say that to you. The team that you work with may not necessarily say that to you. Your boss may not say that to you, but it is true. Your healing is more important than your output because at the end of the day you only have one you. And you have to take care of yourself. The amount of albums you put out, the amount of paragraphs or stances that you write, the amount of design that you can say you completed, the amount of photography that you can say you've done. All those things are not more important than your health all around.

 Amena Brown:

And we can think of examples ad nauseam of people, whose art we love. Right? But we lost them sooner than we wanted to because their output unfortunately became more important to the people around them than their health or their healing. So, that's my first thing what to do when you experience creative block, remember that, and think about, are there things in your life right now that are wounded? Do you have these areas of life where you have all this unprocessed grief, unprocessed disappointment, unprocessed time that you've been in a survival mode? And I want to say, I feel like I'm always a both/and. So here's my both/and. I want to say on the one hand, sometimes you need to heal before you can create. And I think this is different for every person. So you have to find which one of these people is you. But a lot of times for me, I'm not a cathartic creator. I'm not someone that when I'm going through stuff, it's my writing that I pour that into or it's other art that I pour that into.

 Amena Brown:

For me, I don't actually emotionally multitask very well. So, for me sometimes I have to take some time to heal and then return to the creative process. And it can also be true that there are some people that it is creating that is a part of your healing process. It is being creative that is a part of the way that you begin to process grief or process trauma or process things that have been disappointing to you or hurtful to you, or even sometimes process things that have been really amazing and you just don't even know how you process that at the moment. That can also so be true. I think you also have to release yourself from toxic productivity. I think we could all for 2022 stand to do more of this. And is toxic productivity connected to a lot of things? Yes, it is connected to capitalism. It is definitely connected to white supremacy.

 Amena Brown:

It is baked in a lot of our, those of us that live in the states here. It's baked in a lot of our American way of being, it can be baked into a very Western way of being, but we need to release ourselves from that and find ways to do that. I'm going to talk about that a little more later. Another tip I'll give you of what to do when you experience creative block is to take in the creativity of other people. This isn't always to take in their creativity so that you can be like, "Oh, let me take that and just make this thing they made." That's not what I mean when I say that. But I mean, it can be helpful to take in the wonderful and beautiful and fascinating and provocative things that other creative people have made.

 Amena Brown:

And I'll tell you what it does for me, because sometimes of course, our ego is connected to our creative process. Right? We bring our ego into the room in some ways. And some of us have to do that. Right? Some of the art we make, we have to have some ego. We have to have some confidence about it, or why would we do what we're doing if we didn't have a little bit of that? But I think there are times that we end up putting too much pressure on ourselves as if the whole world is going to crumble if we don't fill in the blank with whatever your art is. So for me, the whole world's going to crumble if I don't finish this poem, the whole world is going to crumble if I don't come up with an amazing podcast idea. The whole world is going to fall apart if I don't paint this the exact right way, if I don't design this the exact right way, if I don't make this film the exact right way, right? And I think that's putting too much pressure on ourselves.

 Amena Brown:

And I will tell you one thing that I've started doing, adding to my routine as I started taking very small steps back into my writing process, is I've started adding just a few minutes of reading to that time. And I have other times that I read, but I have very specific books that I like to read before I'm about to write. And I just had to start out really, really small. So I think I started out where of those books I would put my timer on and maybe read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Typically, no longer than 10 minutes. And one of the books I'm reading right now during my writing time is I'm reading Black Women Writers by Claudia Tate. I don't even know if this book is still in print because I found it at a thrift store, but boy, is it wonderful because Claudia Tate is interviewing a lot of amazing Black women writers. And I think the book came out either in the late seventies or early eighties. So you're seeing these interviews with Maya Angelou and ugh, I mean so many amazing Black women writers in this book.

 Amena Brown:

And even reading that book for 10 minutes, it did a thing to me that I didn't think it was going to do. It actually calmed me down and helped me to take less pressure off of what happens when I write, because reading about these Black women and thinking to myself, in my family, in my bloodline, I am a part of a long line of women that have had a wonderful and amazing and difficult and complicated lives, right? And there are so many strides that they made in their own lives that have paved the way for me. So in certain ways, that is a part of what gives me the confidence to do what I'm doing, that I know these women paved the way for me. I hope that in my lifetime I'm paving the way for the other folks to come after me. But creatively, I think that can be helpful too.

 Amena Brown:

There was something about me reading the words of these Black women, that they were actually writing some of them around the time that I was born and thinking to myself these are geniuses. These are Black women who are just brilliant and their work had such an impact the world. And that means my charge is to come to the page or to the creative process and be myself because these women have come before me, I need to come to the page the same way that they came to the page as they are, as who they are with their ideas. And I don't know you all, something about that just helped me to relax a bit and take the pressure off of myself that it's not that the world's going to crumble if I don't write this poem, it's that I want to write this poem because it's important to me to say, or because I have something funny to say, or because I hope me writing this will bring somebody else a laugh about the absurdity of life or whatever is bringing me to that writing process. Right?

 Amena Brown:

So take in the creativity of other people, because it can remind you that as a creative, you are a part of a community of people making things. It is not all on your shoulders to make all the things it's on your shoulders to be exactly who you are to make what you have in your hands, in your mind, in your soul to make. And the last thing I would say what to do when you experience creative block, just start small and try. You might even cry the first time you come back to it. You might not write anything or create anything or draw anything that you think is worth anything at all, but just start small and try. Those of us who are writers talk about the idea of... And I'm not sure whose quote this is. But this idea of sort of writing with the door closed and then you edit with the door open to mean that you have a certain part of your process as a writer that is just you and the page there.

 Amena Brown:

And then you get to a point where you can open up what you've made to an editor or to other people to get perspective, to get feedback or whatever. And I think sometimes we can get to a point where, especially between social media and all these other things that there's so much of what we create that immediately is out there to the public, that then it can feel challenging to sort of close that door again and go back to where it's you and your voice and your stories and your creativity and your ideas in the room. But go back and start small. Even if you just can only do five minutes of sketching, or you can only do five minutes of beginning a little bit of choreography or whatever the creative thing is you do, just start small and try. And when you start small, don't let yourself feel beholden to how what you're making will be in the public, or how it will be received when it's out there.

 Amena Brown:

It's also okay to make things that nobody ever sees or to make things just because you want to see where it goes. And I think when we start sort of taking all of the faceless voices and eyes out of the room with us, then we can really return back to our true process. I want to speak quickly before I end the episode about what to do about creative block when work is your livelihood. I want to speak to my freelancers, my entrepreneurs, my artist entrepreneurs, my people who work for creative agencies and work for companies where you also are doing creative work there. What do you do when you're experiencing creative block? Because even though I don't believe in said white man author's thing about the plumbing, when you do creative work for a living, you don't always have the luxury of being able to be like, "Wow, I'm tired and I don't want to do this right now." Because your rent or your car payment or your insurance or whatever bills you may have are connected to whether or not you can conjure up this creativity, right?

 Amena Brown:

So here are some tips for you. Find one small way this year to create something just because you want to. For those of us who do creative work as our livelihood, or as our job or a vocation occupation, whichever way you refer to it, I think we can become well known for being able to take what other people want to make something creative. And we can do a really great job taking their ideas, their initiatives or whatever it is, and making it amazing. And then we look up and we are so drained that we don't have the energy anymore to really do something, just because we want to, just cause we want to experiment with it, we want to see how it turns out. We're not sure, we don't know all those things. Right?

 Amena Brown:

I want to speak a little bit about the cycle of making things we love and then clients loving what we made and then ending up getting paid for the thing that we started doing because we loved it. Right? And then somehow it sort of feels can not always, but can feel a little tainted, a little corrupted, right? That you are like, "Oh, I started out doing this thing just because I wanted to, well, now it's part of my job to do that thing. Or now a client has seen me doing that thing and they want that exact thing." and so then that becomes a part of the business. And sometimes that also gets disconnected from what you loved about what you were doing in the first place, which is a really hard cycle, right?

 Amena Brown:

So I want you to think about, you may have made something that then led to you getting to where you could do this as your livelihood, which is an amazing opportunity to have if you get this opportunity. It's great. It's great sometimes. Mostly. It's great to be able to have the opportunity to do what you love and make a living at it if that's something that you always dreamed of doing. But it's also okay to think about some ways to return to what you loved about that before there were clients, before there were brands to partner with, before all of that. How do you return to the roots of what you're doing? For me that was going to open mics and hearing other poets in the city. I traveled a lot. Most of my performances were travel for a very long time.

 Amena Brown:

So there was something good for me about returning to the roots of spoken word in Atlanta and getting to sit and listen to other poets, getting to take my new stuff that I was still working the kinks out of. That's one way that I go back to the roots of what I love. So think about that for yourself. And another thing I would say for my people that this is your job job. One thing that you can do about creative block when your creative work is your livelihood, is think about how to institute more rhythms of rest into your work. Think about how to not have your rhythm of work or your pace of life in your job to be where your creativity is constantly you being pulled on without you having an opportunity to pour back into yourself.

 Amena Brown:

So when I say rest, yes, I mean sleep as well. Yes, I mean taking vacation time when you can take it or stay vacation time, even if you can't afford to go somewhere, can you afford to stay at your home, but have some days where you're not having to constant be pulled on by all the people that want, want, want from you. And lastly, for everybody, whether you work in a creative field or not, whatever your creative art is, find small ways to return to what you love and why you loved it in the first place. I want you to think about that for a minute. Think about creative thing that you miss doing the most or that you remember loving doing the most and think about the you that just was starting out. For me, I can think about the girl that went to her first open mic when she was 19 years old and heard some of the most amazing poetry she'd ever heard in her life and also realized how bad her poetry was all at the same time.

 Amena Brown:

And how I went home that night after that first open mic feeling so charged up to write and write better and perform better and having this willingness to keep showing up, even though I was going to stumble and fumble and mess up and forget my poem, I was trying to memorize, go back to those roots for yourself in whatever way and find small ways to return to that. I believe the same thing about creativity that I believe about cooking. We talk about this a lot. Those of us who grew up eating soul food, that's a very like very Black community central idea that when we make soul food, what makes it delicious is yes, someone who can technically cook, right? But it's someone who puts the love in it when they cook. And you want to feel that feeling when you're are being creative.

 Amena Brown:

You want to be putting the love in it. And if you've gotten to the point where you're not putting the love in it, I hope you'll go back and think about what's causing that block for you is a period of resting and not making what you need is therapy. What you need is time with your friends who are not super concerned with whatever you do at work. They just love you for you. Is that what you need? Whatever you need, take care of yourself this year, go gently into the year, go gently into your goals, be kind to your body, be kind to your past self, be kind to who you are right now. That's the way we start the new year. See you all next week. HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and Partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 59

Amena Brown:

Y'all welcome back to a new episode of HER With Amena Brown. And y'all, I just want right now for you to give yourself a special shout out for making it to almost the end of 2021. This is a big deal y'all. Normally when a year would end prior to the pandemic, I would not be like, wow, y'all we made it. But y'all we made it because it's a lot, it's been a lot. So we're here. And one of the things that we did last year to close 2020 that I was like, I think I want to bring this back is we had Kelundra Smith on here, a wonderful and fabulous writer. I always add additional things to your title Kelundra, so I'm going to say what I think it is and then you probably need to come back and be like, what is she talking about and correct me. But whenever I'm telling people about you, I'm like, yes, Kelundra, arts, culture, critic, writer, journalist. I just throw some words together. Am I saying accurate things right now Kelundra, are those accurate words?

Kelundra Smith:

You are saying accurate things, you could say storyteller extraordinaire.

Amena Brown:

That's it, that's my favorite. I the storyteller extraordinaire. Well, y'all welcome Kelundra Smith back to the podcast.

Kelundra Smith:

Thank you all so much, I'm so excited to be back here. I'm a fan of HER With Amena Brown, I'm a fan of Amena. So I'm just thrilled to be back here and for us to be able to talk about the thing that both of us love, which is TV.

Amena Brown:

Ooh, I can't wait, I cannot wait. It's really hard for me Kelundra because sometimes I'm watching TV and literally almost messaged you about some Real Housewives something a couple of weeks ago and was like, "Don't do that because you about to get on a podcast work," and that makes things hard. But I need to really do this throughout the year so that we can start having some little touch points so I can be like, "Are you watching this? What's going on?" So before we get into the TV, Kelundra, I know that you have been up to some wonderful creative projects since the last time we were here. So can you catch the people up on what you've been up to and what you have coming up because I be seeing your name, it'd be some playwriting. It just be a lot of wonderful things. So tell the people what you've been up to.

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, I'm so excited. First of all, when you were talking about the pandemic and us making it, felt that deeply. But what I will also say is that this period of time has allowed me the chance to expand my storytelling possibilities beyond working in marketing and communications, beyond working in journalism and criticism, I'm now adding playwriting onto that slate. I'm super excited because I was accepted into a program called Black Women Speak. It's hosted by the National New Play Network and Horizon Theater here in Atlanta. And that program will develop nine new plays by Southern Black women playwrights. And so I'm thrilled to be a part of that program and to see the work that will emerge from it and to see all of our work travel to stages not just across Atlanta but across hopefully the country and the world.

Kelundra Smith:

So that's one exciting thing that's really happening. The other thing is that next spring I'll have a reading of a play of mine at Kenny Leon's True Colors Theater, and I super thrilled about that. And then I'll also have something next summer that I can't quite say yet but I'll keep the people posted that'll be happening as well. So it's really to me truly been amazing to see what happens when God gives you an idea and you just walk it out because that's really what it is for me. I never intended to write plays, but God gave me an idea and I sat down at the computer. I'm still sitting down at the computer and it's just applying. Discipline and God's will together will take you places you never thought oh.

Amena Brown:

Okay. I didn't know I was going to get a word today during this episode, but I receive it. And one of the things that I have just found really inspiring about watching your journey Kelundra because of course, I am one of those Black women that when I see my Black women friends winning on social media, I am one of those Black women that's in the comments like, "Yes, honey, yes, a face, yes, a play, yes." I just got to do that. And so when I saw the Black Women Speak and I was like, "Oh my gosh, Kelundra, yes." Just to see you next to all of these other amazing women as well, to see you celebrated and to look forward to the work that we're going to get to see, I'm so excited about that.

Amena Brown:

And I think the other thing for me that's so inspiring about it Kelundra is, shout out to any writers that are listening, but I think sometimes ... And I'm sure this could be true for other creative work or for other industries even. But I feel like in writing sometimes it can be easy to become pigeonholed in a way of, oh, write fiction and that's what I do. And to then become afraid to explore other genres of writing where you could still use that same skill but in this different way. And I love that for you that you have this amazing communications and journalism experience and now taking that into the world of playwriting. Does that feel like this wonderful creative challenge for get a chance to do that?

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, it does. It's exciting sometimes to be bad at something before you're good at it. Playwriting opens up a whole nother part of my storytelling brain, so to speak. And it requires just a different way of approaching storytelling because it really has to ... There's structure to it, but then there's also incredible imagination that goes into it. I will never forget when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, and my mother she knew probably around the time I was three or four that I was really good at telling stories and writing and that sort of thing. And she said to me around the time I was 9 or 10, she was like, "Well, if you're going to be a writer, just remember that good writers can write anything."

Kelundra Smith:

And that's what has propelled me, it's like I'm going to learn how to do grant writing well, I'm going to learn how to do poetry, I'm going to learn how to do these different things. And the thing about it that's so awesome is that it always has opportunity to expand. I've never written a novel, but I want to one day. So that'll be the next phase. It's been really excited writing to stumble through it and learn how to get good at it.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. I am right now in the middle of a writing project that involves me writing things that have to be connected to music. And I told a friend of mine I feel so wonderfully creatively challenged, and I love to feel like that, and I also feel out of my depths. At the same time, I feel like, oh, I'm so glad I'm doing this. I love learning new ways to write. You have to have such economy with your words when you're writing in a songwriting mode. So there's half of me that's like, oh yes, I love this, this is so great. And then there's half of me that's like, wait, what am I doing exactly? What's this work y'all? I don't know. I mean, I write a bunch of poems that don't really rhyme, and a song needs to rhyme I think.

Kelundra Smith:

I have a feeling that when we get a chance to hear and see the work that you're doing it's old hat for you. You have a way with the pen that is admirable to me. I don't believe you at all that you're out of your depth of field, I think you're right where you're supposed to be.

Amena Brown:

Well, now that I know we're both doing things that we're learning, I can be messaging you in between like, girl, let me tell you. Because there's a lot of moments to writing in general where you have an idea in your mind even when you know that portion of your craft very well, you have an idea in your mind and you sit down to write and sometimes it takes a lot more drafting than you thought to actually see the idea you imagined. That first draft is like, this is terrible and my idea is brilliant, so something is a gap here between these two things. But as a writer, I think in the genre you're familiar more with writing, you get used to that feeling. When I'm writing something that I'm not as familiar, it's almost like I felt myself freaking. I just remember that I don't know how this cake is supposed to taste exactly. And so we in the kitchen, but I don't know if it's too much vanilla, I don't know what I'm doing here.

Kelundra Smith:

It could be a chocolate cake by the end, this could be a carrot cake by the end, I have no idea.

Amena Brown:

I'm just here.

Kelundra Smith:

As you're saying that, it's like you've been in my head. I'm writing an essay right now. And when you said the idea in my head and what's on the paper are not matching, I feel that way right now with this essay. I just keep looking at this essay like the Google Doc will give me the answers.

Amena Brown:

Please Google Doc, tell me something because things are not coming out like they're supposed to. Well, thankfully today Kelundra we are here to talk about the things that other people have written, which means we can laugh at them and we can celebrate them. And then they don't have anything to do with what we have to put together, bless our hearts today. So I'm excited to have here to go over what has been I believe a wonderful year of TV, I have to say. I still can't tell Kelundra, when we were talking last year this time, we were all going through this period of time where even though we weren't technically on lockdown anymore, we were all pretty much sequestered to our home homes or in our little pods of the people that we knew. So I do feel like I was watching a lot more television in 2020 than I did this year.

Amena Brown:

But I have to say, this year I had more stuff to do, so I was a little more selective. But I still feel like the quality of television, and we will discuss how we're defining quality here in this episode I feel has been really wonderful. So I want to start with this because it has been a wonderful year of the docu-series. And we talked about Tiger King last year, which as of this recording Tiger King 2 is also on its way to us. I want to say to y'all that I'm above it, and I want to say to y'all that I'm not going to do that to my time and that I have scholarly books to read instead. And I would be lying to y'all because I'm going to watch every minute of that when it comes out. You can tell me one or if you couldn't narrow down to one what were some of your favorite docu-series of this year?

Kelundra Smith:

Amena, I too am not above it, but in a worse way than Tiger King. I love what I call the scamumentary, the cultmentary form of docu-series. I don't know what it is in me that loves a good unpacking of a cult or a scam. But I'm here for it every time, I will watch every single one. And so can we talk about LuLaRich on Amazon Prime.

Amena Brown:

Speak about it, speak about it.

Kelundra Smith:

Because I have several questions about how these people got so caught up over these ugly leggings.

Amena Brown:

I've never seen uglier prints in my whole entire life Kelundra. And I'm not going to lie about it because as you know and some of my listeners are familiar with this too that I used to work a lot in very specifically white conservative evangelical environments. And I remember the wave of time that the white women in those environments were like, we live and die upon what is going on with these LuLaRoe leggings. And now that I've had a chance to see actually the prints, I was like, what's happening with these llamas, are we ...

Kelundra Smith:

Cheeseburgers, llamas, sharks. It's like they threw the pasta at the back splash. And whatever they could get digitally printed on a half a piece of fabric, they invent to sell. And then what killed the most is there are women out there who are just like, "LuLaRoe changed my life." And I'm just like, but how? The math does not math right. How are you selling $20 leggings and raking in a six-figure income? Make it make sense. And then as scamumentaries always do, it just explodes when we find out that it's a pyramid scheme. Of course, it is. A pyramid scheme tied up in eugenics. I mean, it really has all the makings.

Amena Brown:

Please, and eugenics, I can't.

Kelundra Smith:

It has the makings of quality entertainment, I was hooked. I watched the whole thing in one sitting. I kid you not Amena, I was supposed to go pick my elderly aunt up and I missed because I was watching LuLaRich.

Amena Brown:

I'm sorry auntie, you got to hold on because I got to find out what happened to these ugly leggings, honey, I got to find out. Wow, I feel I'm just admitting a lot of my guilty pleasures, but I'm a fan of organized crime in general, so I have enjoyed a mafia flick for this reason. And I have enjoyed some corporate greed type of fictional series or documentaries. I'm like, if I'm going to have crime, if I was going to do crime, I'm not going to do crime. But if I was going to do crime, I would get involved in organized crime because I would feel like, why should we be disorganized? If we're going to go ahead and make illegal money, why should we be a mess? You know what I'm saying? And so these types of, to your term, scamumentaries really get in line with you decided you were going to be involved in some organized crime, you were going to go ahead and do an organized scam situation.

Amena Brown:

The people entering from the bottom thought they were coming into something super amazing, but here you are organized and scamming. And I think the particular thing about the LuLaRich documentary that sent me Kelundra was the founders, the founding couple actually agreeing to be interviewed for this. I don't know why that sent me, that was wild. This woman's large amount of hair, we are going to get into some other hair in a minute. But this woman's hair, I was just like, y'all agreed to sit down for something that you knew was going to shade you. Did you think you were going to get your correct story that this scamming, these moldy leggings in the end didn't happen? When the women were like, "I got a package of wet leggings," I was like, "Wait a minute."

Kelundra Smith:

But then sat down in the LuLaRoe dress with the Versace pumps, I was like, shameless, shameless. Just so certain that it was all going to work out, that the feds were not going to come and knock, and maybe did the feds come and knock? I'm so ready for the sequel, they can come with that any day.

Amena Brown:

Okay, ready to see it. And let me give a glimpse for those of you that did not partake of this LuLaRich documentary. And if you just have some time, I hate to say I'm encouraging you, but I am. I want you to watch it because it's fascinating. But LuLaRich is a, two Kelundra's term she introduced us to, it is a scamumentary series about a woman who started a legging, I would say in general clothing or apparel, but was known most for legging business that became this pyramid scheme targeted pretty specifically at white women who were stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home wives to encourage them that they could make extra income. But in the end of course the people making the most money were at the top. And as we see in most pyramid schemes, the people suffering were at the bottom. But you need this in your life. If you want to know why pizza was ever printed on leggings in this situation, you really need to get involved. I'm not going to lie about it.

Kelundra Smith:

That was terrible. Those prints were so terrible. When you mentioned hair though, speaking of another docu-series, are we going to talk about The Way Down?

Amena Brown:

That was going to be my answer to my favorite docu-series, The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, which is-

Kelundra Smith:

Another scamumentary.

Amena Brown:

Okay. And here we are in a religious scamumentary in this situation. It was religion and business and fat phobia and weight loss all just decided to come together and be in the same area. And yes, I did sit down in one sitting and also watch this and then got to the end and was like, gasp. Touches one's clavicle, we're going to have a part two of this, there's more updates to this.

Kelundra Smith:

We have two.

Amena Brown:

I need this in my life.

Kelundra Smith:

We have two.

Amena Brown:

If you have not seen in this documentary, The Way Down is about Gwen Shamblin and family, Gwen Shamblin and her family. This to me was this combination of Gwen Shamblin having used spiritual principles, air quotes, to lose weight and initially having this part of the business that connected weight loss to spiritual disciplines. You can already feel the problems coming right here. When we start trying to connect those things, that's about to be a problem. But then somehow at some point Gwen decides I don't need to just have these workshops at other people's churches, I also need to start a church and just try to meld all of this together, meld the weight loss and the preaching and the church attendance, also side note for end the wild ways to discipline your children that bring us into some areas of crime. So first of all, as previously stated, really these two documentaries, if I had another me Kelundra, there's an essay somewhere. There's a think piece somewhere about the connections between these two documentaries, these two stories because still really targeting for the most part the same target groups, right?

Kelundra Smith:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

Still targeting-

Kelundra Smith:

Eugenics and scams, it's eugenics and scams. That's the essay right there. It's these two documentaries prey on educated white women who found themselves unfulfilled by being stay-at-home moms and looking for a purpose and a social outlet outside of being a stay-at-home mom. And it is absolutely wild to me how successful both of these ventures were in preying on these women who truly just wanted a place of belonging and wound up in a scamumentary.

Amena Brown:

Okay, okay. And let me give a special shout out to the Black woman in LuLaRich with her door knockers.

Kelundra Smith:

She retweeted me, did I tell you that?

Amena Brown:

Did she? No, tell me more about this.

Kelundra Smith:

She retweeted me, I was so excited because she was having none of it, she was having none of it. And she retweeted me. I'm going to find the tweet, keep going-

Amena Brown:

I need this in my life because as soon as she showed up and started spilling all the tea, I was like, sis, thank you for being here. And similarly, there was a Black woman who had been a member of Gwen Shamblin's church who was in The Way Down telling all the business in the pointed way that I needed to hear it from her. I don't love to see that these Black women had to be involved in everything that went down in these situations or any of the people unfortunately that were victims of this. But for your entertainment purposes in watching this, there are a couple of people narrating these stories that I just, and I give a special shout out to these two Black women because the Black women in the LuLaRich, the way she was like, "I used to work there, I used to sell them clothes too. And then, and you wouldn't believe ... As soon as I saw the door knockers, I said, honey, you are who I need in my life right now, please.

Kelundra Smith:

The thing about the lady from the LuLaRich scamumentary is that I don't think they messed with her and her money. she didn't seem she had lost not narrowly a coin. I think they knew who to do it to because she didn't seem like her money was bothered. It seemed it was more ethical reasons. When she saw the feds were coming, she was like, "Oh no, I got to go." But she didn't seem like she was so bothered by the financial piece like our sister in The Way Down. It seemed when they started coming for the families, that's when she was like, "Oh no, you got to go." And actually, I misspoke. It was our sister from The Way Down who retweeted me. First of all, she's hilarious because her whole Twitter bio is, yes, that's where you know me from. And I just was like, I'm already here for you.

Amena Brown:

I tell you, I need that on a sweatshirt right now, yes, that's where you know me from.

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, that's where you know me from.

Amena Brown:

And I hate to get involved in my Biggy voice, but if you don't know, now you know, period.

Kelundra Smith:

Now you know.

Kelundra Smith:

You know,

Amena Brown:

Period sis. Oh my gosh, I'm here for that. Let me switch genres here for us, we needed a lot of humor and comedy this year to continue surviving a pandemic because we're still in a pandemic everybody. What was your favorite funny show of 2021? What was one show? This could be a sitcom. We have some sketch comedy, we have some shows that I think were supposed to be dramedies but still landed for me on the funny side of things. What would be one of your favorite funny shows of the year?

Kelundra Smith:

This was probably the hardest thing to choose for me because there have been a lot of good things that have been funny this year. I will say the one I'm going to say out loud is what I love. I really, really deeply enjoyed PAUSE with Sam Jay on HBO Max. But I'm going to give an honorable mention to two other shows, and that's going to be Hacks also on HBO, hilarious.

Amena Brown:

Yes, I celebrate Hacks, it was amazing.

Kelundra Smith:

Yes. And we're also going to give a honorable mention to this little Black adaptation of The Wonder Years, it's too funny.

Amena Brown:

I need to speak about this with you, I need to speak about this Kelundra because I'm not going to lie that when I saw it I was feeling a little bit some type of way. First of all, because I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about the original Wonder Years. And then I was like, why can't we just have a television show with Black people, why does it have to be a re-adaptation? I'm going to have an honest moment that when I saw Lee Daniels name on this I had slight concerns because I haven't been a fan of Empire, and I was not a fan of Star. So I was like, what's about to happen here, guys? I just don't know. I got to say that show, I love it. I love the show, I love the characters.

Amena Brown:

I love the way that it's sort of like if we look at a certain period of history, it's like when we're studying that, whether that's in a class or in even a documentary or something, it's like there are certain parts of that that have to be glossed over sometimes intentionally but sometimes unintentionally just because we can't cover all of the particulars of that time, all of the different of how people actually lived in that moment. And I love about this show the mother, the layers to the mother's character in this new adaptation of The Wonder Years, this very feminist, womanist, sex positive Black woman sitting here in this family in the 60s.

Amena Brown:

I love that because many of us can look at our families and say, "Oh, I had an aunt like that." But you're not reading about my aunt or my cousin or whoever that was in my family, you're not reading about that in your history book. You're reading about the Civil Rights Movement, you're reading about these things that were big historic moments but you're not getting to read about this Black woman who had these porn magazines in the basement of the house. That episode when it was those porn magazines belong to the mother, I live, I live.

Kelundra Smith:

Everything, everything. The original Wonder Years predated me, but I did go back and watch the original Wonder Years when I heard that this new one was coming out. And the original Wonder Years is quite funny, and it's charming, it's lovely. It's so appropriate for the time period and very bold to be reflecting on the 1960s and the 1980s when it did. What I love about this new version though is that it shows how the other half was living, so to speak. It's was a Black family in Montgomery, Alabama.

Kelundra Smith:

And we have little Dean living through school integration and having to adjust to go into a new school after his all Black school has been shut down. We're seeing the burgeoning of the women's rights movement as you were alluding to through the mother. The episode with the mom at work had so much resonance and shows you so much of what women go through in the workplace. How the baseball coach, Dean's baseball coach who is also a friend of the family works at the Department of the Treasury, which that was so hilarious when we learned that's where the mom works. When Dean's like, "Mom didn't do anything important."

Amena Brown:

Not your mom working at the Department of the Treasury bruh.

Kelundra Smith:

But when we see how mom is taking her lunch alone because she's not a part of the boys' club and she can't fraternize with the young white women who are the secretaries, so kind of in this place of isolation. Then there's an episode which I don't want to spoil where they, a recent episode where they go camping. I screamed the whole time because I, Amena, was a girl scout. And I remember my camping trip, and it went something like this camping trip in The Wonder Years. From the raggedy can't get the tent together to the rain, I saw my whole life flash before me in that episode. I think they're doing some really funny and brilliant TV. And the woman who plays the mom in this new version is Saycon Sengbloh, and she is from Atlanta.

Amena Brown:

Yes, ATL ho, we love to see it, yes. We love to see that she did that. I'm here for that show. If y'all aren't watching it, that's a good one. And it's nice to have a feel good show. And I especially love to have a feel good show around this wonderful Black family, I love it.

Kelundra Smith:

And it's opposite of the very adult PAUSE with Sam Jay though, which was my official pick.

Amena Brown:

Tell me more about the show because I have not watched it yet. It's been in my queue forever but I have not watched it yet because I was kind of like, "Am I ready to watch this?" I saw some of the clips and I was like, "Am I ready for this? I don't know." So discuss with me and the people what are the vibes, and what did you love about it?

Kelundra Smith:

Sure. So for people who don't know Sam Jay is a queer Black comedian out of Boston. And if you have not watched her standup special on Netflix-

Amena Brown:

She's hilarious.

Kelundra Smith:

You absolutely should.

Amena Brown:

She's hilarious.

Kelundra Smith:

You are not ready to laugh this hard. But she has a series HBO Max called PAUSE with Sam Jay that is basically her and her homies from the industry in her house the hills having a kick back. And then in each episode they get off on a tangent of talking about some topic. And then we see her exploring these different subjects. And one of the ones that to me was the most pointed was when she really took us inside of stud culture and movements within stud culture, of liberation and things like that. Each episode, she's giving us something like that, whether we're talking about race, whether we're talking about relationships, whether we're talking about work, whether we're talking about sexuality, every episode. But she's just going there in the most hilarious way. And so to me Sam Jay, I think this is her time. She was a writer on SNL and she's been a writer on some other shows. And I love seeing her star rise and I love that she has given us a TV show that's not like anything else I've ever seen. The narrative format of it is so different.

Amena Brown:

Oh, I love it. I feel encouraged to watch it now because I forget at what point I saw about it and then I was like, "Okay, it looks there's going to be some discussions about racism." And I was like, "Am I ready for that? I don't know." But now hearing you discuss this with me, I'm like, "Okay, I need to watch it, I need to watch it," because I think Sam Jay is hilarious.

Kelundra Smith:

She keeps it funny. It's pointed, but it's funny. You're going to laugh out loud more than you're like ooh.

Amena Brown:

I think my choice for a favorite funny show would be Desus & Mero. And let me tell you the saddest times of the year is when Desus & Mero be like, we about to go take a break.

Kelundra Smith:

On hiatus.

Amena Brown:

I be too mad. I be like, I want y'all to be free and kick it with your people, sit at your house and breathe or whatever you do when you're not working, but what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?

Kelundra Smith:

Also, I share this sentiment.

Amena Brown:

Why do you leave me here? First of all, the different news things that they respond to on the show really be sending me, like be sending me. Some of the people that they have brought to the forefront, this news anchor that they love so much.

Kelundra Smith:

Maurice DuBois.

Amena Brown:

I'm like, I would never even know who Maurice DuBois was, but here we are. I did not grow up anywhere where yerrr was a greeting, and yet here I am. As soon as they come on-

Kelundra Smith:

Yerrr.

Amena Brown:

Okay, okay. I'm going to be scared to say it if I actually go to New York. I'm going to be like, you don't say it when you're there unless you from there, you don't get that. That's a privilege, you don't get to do that. But when I'm at my a house, I do say it and I enjoy it very much. I think they are hilarious. I think watching them sometimes get drunker and drunker during the show and the amount of things that especially, I want to say, especially Mero and the times that Desus's face is looking like, dog, you're really going to ruin this for us at Showtime talking crazy on here? Dog, what are you doing?

Amena Brown:

And then the interviews, the times that people are laughing so hard at them that they can't even answer the questions or promote whatever it was they were supposed to promote. I was like, y'all are all here, y'all got Kelly Rowland laughing so hard. I'm like, is it an album? What was we all here talking about? I can't remember.

Kelundra Smith:

I have no idea what she was selling to this date, she was just gone. But I'm the same way. First of all, nice to look at. Mero is married but Desus is not. And so if he listens to HER With Amena Brown, please slide in my DM.

Amena Brown:

Desus, we know you're listening, it's a DM available for you Desus.

Kelundra Smith:

So they're good to look at. But also the thing about them is that when you were talking about the types of things they respond to, they are not a regurgitation of every other late night show, which I love. Desus & Mero had this one story that was some goats got loose in this neighborhood. And when I say I screamed, I was like, where do y'all even find this? Who is the person that is scouring back doors of the internet to try to find this content for you all to talk about? The stories that they talk about are so funny. But I also love how purposefully, they don't beat you over the head with it. They're in the show saying put on your mask, Black lives matter.

Kelundra Smith:

They also in who they put on the show, in the conversations they have when they stumble and they may say something that may be prejudice, that maybe can be misconstrued as homophobic, they correct each other in a loving way while it's recording. And they don't tell their people to edit it out, they say leave that in. They use their show as a demonstration for how to bring in levity and love into situations, which I really love. But they're doing it in such a subtle way and you're just laughing the whole time. Also shout out to whoever their wardrobe stylist is because when-

Amena Brown:

Look, the kicks. The kicks are so fresh. It's almost upsetting to me the way it's coordinating between the kicks and the jeans or pants, whatever. Mero with the sweatshirt. Who is making sure that Desus's beard glistens like this? That's also upsetting for me. I'm like, is it oil sheen? Tell us the secrets, we don't know.

Kelundra Smith:

Tracy Ellis Ross every time they have her on, she just goes to his beard like this, she just does it. And I'm just like, me too, Tracy, how does it work? Yes, I love me some Desus & Mero. And I agree whenever they go on hiatus, I'm like, listen, I know y'all have lives and families and things, but all also I need you.

Amena Brown:

Okay. Because I don't want to watch nobody else really except for y'all. I'm like, I was trying to respect that this was twice a week, that this was a late night show on twice a week. And I had to just be like, Amena, the people need to have time to breathe and just be black and people of color in America, they don't need to be here five nights a week. I had to give myself a talk, Kelundra, because I'm like, I have to accept, I'm only going to get two nights a week of this, and then y'all go on a long hiatus and things happen in the news that I'm like, where is Desus & Mero to discuss this with me, where y'all at? Y'all just at your house, you on vacation. What you doing, dog, what are we supposed to do during this time?

Kelundra Smith:

I agree. But I will say if you have not on their YouTube channel, if you watch their warmups, which are not aired on the TV.

Amena Brown:

Oh, my wait a minute. See, you about put me on now.

Kelundra Smith:

Get ready to scream. The warmups are fantastic and you hear producer Julia-

Amena Brown:

Oh, I love Julia so much.

Kelundra Smith:

Come on guys.

Amena Brown:

I'm here for it, please. Whenever she's like, "Guys, are we going to?" She has these little questions, and when she laughs, when they make her laugh and you can hear her laughing on there, that gives me a lot of joy as well, lots of joy. Special shout out to Desus & Mero, my favorite late night show. We also just very quickly need to discuss Black Lady Sketch Show because I enjoy this show very much, I enjoyed the first season. And then it was like we went into the second season this year and had a switch up of writers as well as actors, comedians on the show. So I would love to hear your thoughts, what you felt now that we are in the sophomore season of Black Lady Sketch Show. I love everything, I'm here for it.

Kelundra Smith:

First of all, I love Black Lady Sketch Show because I love that it kind of debunks this idea that Black women can't be funny. So often we're depicted as serious and angry and all of these things. That show is silly, there is no serious about it. The way that they do the sketches is just so smart. And they don't try to make it make sense for you. In this second season and even in the first one, we're counting down to some event, we may or may not be in this post apocalyptic world. And then in between, there are these sketches, there's a gang that dresses in pink and has maternity leave policy votes. We have a friend who's the yes queen girl who the whole building's on fire and she's still going, yes, fire extinguisher, yes. Then we have a tired twerk in the club with Miguel. It's just nonsense, and I'm here for all of it. I love A Black Lady Sketch Show.

Amena Brown:

It was so great, it was so great. Shout out to Robin Thede and thank you Robin for letting us know how to say your last name because I had a lot of questions. I was like, I'm not sure. So thank you for that tweet but she was like Theedee. She was like, "Even though y'all want to call me Robin Theed, that's not it." Thank you Robin because I didn't know. But I want to give a shout out to her because I feel when we think about sketch comedy shows, obviously there's this pedestal for SNL. And not that that is not in some ways warranted, but we have known SNL to be an environment that has not been great for Black women, has not been great for Black comedians, just really has not been great for non-white, non-straight writers and comedians in a lot of ways. They have had to be embarrassed into diversifying their writers and comedians.

Amena Brown:

So I want to give a shout out to Robin Thede for being like, "We don't have to keep knocking on a door if you don't want us. It's a table here that we can build for ourselves that we can make these Easter egg sketches full of all this comedy." There are some times they'll do a sketch that I'll be like, "Oh my gosh, that's a Black girl thing, yes." They just put it in there. Like the whole sketch with featuring Omarion, as long as Omarion was in the sketch, I was just like, oh, there's so many things here that are quintessentially Black girl and Black woman that are there without apology and without explanation. And so shout out to Black Lady Sketch Show. If y'all haven't watched it, you need to, it's amazing, it's great.

Amena Brown:

That's how I learned I was basic from season one. I was like, wow, Angela Bassett really had to come and be in a sketch on this show to let me know because I don't be having lashes because I'll be wearing ... I was like, say one more thing that I'm doing. I'm basic? I am basic? I have to own up to it.

Kelundra Smith:

She said, "I don't want to be a bad bitch on tape."

Amena Brown:

When she was like, "I want to wear flats, I want to just not have to wear lashes." I was like, okay, all these things she listed, I literally called my sister and was like, "Am I basic? Did you watch Black Lady Sketch Show, and am I basic?" Am my sister being quiet, which meant basically she was like, yeah, yeah.

Kelundra Smith:

Your sister is fabulous though. I've never seen her not dress to the nines, she would make us all feel basic.

Amena Brown:

Period. I could go somewhere with her where she's wearing a black dress and some chucks but the way the dress is styled and the chucks and her bald head, it's like everywhere we go, I don't care where we were at, we could be in the middle of Walmart and people being like, "Yes sis." I'll just be proud to be standing next to her. I also learned how to dress because she's my sister, thank you. I also, I too, I too. Let's switch gears and talk about favorite drama series, what was your favorite drama series from the year?

Kelundra Smith:

I was surprised that this show became my favorite drama series. But I have to say I'm musing onto a network that I normally never watch. And that is CBS. And I am here for Queen Latifah kicking butt and taking names in The Equalizer.

Amena Brown:

Wow, yes.

Kelundra Smith:

I am here for it. I love this show, I don't know why. It's a girl power sort of thing I think for me where it's like, she's this retired CIA agent who's now using her cronies from the CIA and the dark web to give justice to people who wouldn't be able to access it without being criminalized by the criminal justice system, which is really interesting. It's like most of the people who she's helping are Middle Eastern, Latino, Black. They're folks who if they were to go to the police with this problem they would immediately be under, suspicious themselves, so to speak. But she is the one who they can go to. The whole thing is like, I'm who you go to when you can't call anyone else. And every episode we see these different aspects of society that are not so out of the question of how people are having to interact and engage. And then there's some freaky stuff technologically in there.

Kelundra Smith:

I remember the first episode they dealt with deep fakes and deep fake where somebody made it look this girl had committed a murder. I was like, could this happen to me? I just be walking down the street, living my whole little, best life, could I be on the belt line and then all of a sudden somebody just snap my image and plaster it onto this video as if I'm committing a murder and the next thing you know I'm prison? It's crazy. So I really am loving The Equalizer, I love seeing her kick behind. Also shout out to the wardrobe stylist on that show, but we always know Queen-

Amena Brown:

The way she be dressed, honey.

Kelundra Smith:

Gives us hair, she gives us wardrobe, it's always.

Amena Brown:

The way those curves arrive every time, I just love it. I'm just like, yes, come on hips, yes, Queen, yes.

Kelundra Smith:

Every time. And then Lorraine Toussaint plays her aunt who's helping her raise her daughter.

Amena Brown:

And you know I love Lorraine, yes.

Kelundra Smith:

We love Lorraine. We've been with Lorraine since Any Day Now.

Amena Brown:

Would you please bring up Any Day Now on this, please? Oh, come one. I love that show. She's literally the reason why I was watching Any Day Now. Kelundra, please. And I want to give a special shout out to, okay, this is the thing that I'm not sure if it's specifically Black, if it's specifically Black and Southern. But I have a lot of memories of certain shows I watched with my grandparents or great grandparents. And some of us have these stories even if you didn't grow up in the South, you had a certain time of the year that you maybe went to for the summer or for certain holidays you spent with your grandparents. And I remember watching the original Equalizer with my grandmother, and so seeing this show, I mean, first of all, it's like sometimes of course we get upset about there not being more space for original stories, original ideas that there's being this space made to do these re-adaptations.

Amena Brown:

And I do think sometimes there is something to that that we want to be able to see these original stories also. But sometimes there is some nostalgia to seeing that re-adaptation and to think here I was this little Black girl in North Carolina watching this white man as the Equalizer on the original show at six or seven years old. And now here I am a grown woman getting to see Queen Latifah play that character now is wonderful to me, I love it. That was a great mention there.

Kelundra Smith:

Let me do just a quick honorable mention to Delilah on OWN.

Amena Brown:

Okay, please.

Kelundra Smith:

If you love a good scandalous story, Delilah is for those of us who were here for American Violet and Erin Brockovich. If those two movies they're your speed, you're going to like Delilah on OWN. And then the other one I have to give a quick shout out to is I really still love me some New Amsterdam on NBC. I love a medical drama, I don't know why. Go ahead Amena, I just had to get that in there.

Amena Brown:

No, these are some good honorable mentions, I'm going to lie about it. I chose as my favorite drama series Impeachment on FX. Shout out to producer Monica Lewinsky letting these people know, executive producer Monica Lewinsky letting these people know that she'd done had enough of y'all telling a story and getting to paint yourselves the way you want to. I'm going to executive produce this series. And it's so much tea, I don't know where y'all from. If y'all drink Milo's, I don't know. But down here if you don't make the sweet tea at your own house, you go to the store and you get the gallon of Milo's. That's just how it is down here. And the way Monica pulled up with a truck of Milo's for the people and was just like, "Somebody asked for the tea? I'm going to go ahead and do a series of the tea. Y'all want to know about Linda Tripp, the tea, y'all want to know about Bill Clinton, the tea."

Amena Brown:

I mean, she pulled up with the tea for the people. And I am just enraptured watching this unfold. I wasn't alive when I was actually watching it on the news, I'm really looking like ... This thing really got me, it got me to the point Kelundra ... First of all, I am a person that watches fictional characters and sometimes has the feeling inside that I want to pray for them real quick, I get that involved in the story. And Monica Lewinsky really got me watching Impeachment wanting someone to set up a GoFundMe. She doesn't have money, she's not doing okay in her life. But I'm really like, wow, who's going to support this young girl, who is going to give this young girl the resource to move on after the way they did her? Y'all, I am very involved in this thing that's based on history, and we already know how it turned out. But yo, yo.

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, I'm with you. That dog on Ryan Murphy, the way he knows he has us pulled into this foolishness is that every episode is more than an hour long, and yet we still watch it.

Amena Brown:

I do every time.

Kelundra Smith:

We're sitting there-

Amena Brown:

I'm not going to stop.

Kelundra Smith:

For an hour and a half watching the tea just spill all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, it's just a mess. There's so many layers of the foolishness. When the whole Lewinsky thing was happening, I was too young to really have any comprehension or memory of it. I remember this happening, I remember the dress, all of that stuff, but I don't remember, remember. I was in elementary school. I find myself watching American Crime Story Impeachment and getting mad. I'm like, I know why people are mad at the Clintons. And then I feel sorry for Hillary because it's just like, dang, she's never going to ever be able to live this down. And then I look at Monica and I'm like, I like that she's having her say, this is genius. If this had happened today versus when it happened, this would've been handled completely differently, we see that 100%. And then also I look at this and I was like ... Linda Tripp, man.

Amena Brown:

Linda. And I'm like, Linda ain't even here for me to be on her social so I can be like ... Linda has since passed on. But I was like, if Linda was still alive, I would've been all up over her Instagram and Twitter like, "What you going to say for yourself sis? What you going to say?"

Kelundra Smith:

She manipulated Monica for her own ... And then she got this reputation of being a whistleblower but it wasn't motivated by justice. It was motivated by her own greed but we don't know because Linda died last year, the rona got her. We say, God, raise the dead. I have questions though. The thing I need to know Amena is so we see a series the president giving her these gifts, were we the American people funding this girl's lifestyle?

Amena Brown:

Were we funding these copies of Walt Whitman, these tote bags.

Kelundra Smith:

But also the apartment she lived in was just fabulous. The math ain't mathing right, as they say. And so I'm like, were we the tax paying American public funding that? I have more questions. I would like a retrial so that I can cross-examine.

Amena Brown:

This is the most recent episode without spoiling. But there's a moment where Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky both have to face a jury for the perjury. I think this was connected to the Paula Jones, which was leading up to the impeachment, but they have to face a jury. And I don't know if this was actually true to history, but in the show there are a lot of Black women in the jury that they're having to talk to. Also want y'all to know that the Southern place that I come from words like jury and horror only have one syllable, and I'm sorry. Y'all be horror, I don't, it's horror. Whore, W-H-O-R-E and H-O-R-R-O-R are the same word and talk to your mama about it.

Amena Brown:

Also jury and jeweler, same, I don't know. Y'all need some Ws, some Rs, talk to your mom about it. There are Black women in the jury giving true and good Black women WTF face especially as Monica is describing the way she was manipulated in the situation. And then when Linda Tripp comes in and Linda's thinking that she's the righteous one. She's like, "I'm the one who's telling all the truth." These Black women are like, "But why did you do that Linda? Why did you say that Linda?" The way they were leaning to the side, I was like, thank you to these Black women actresses in here because we need this very much. So special shout out to Impeachment, I've gotten very involved, I'm very involved.

Amena Brown:

Let me switch gears because we cannot leave this episode, there's two things we cannot leave this episode without talking about. And the first one is Insecure. We need to just have a moment. If you're not familiar with Insecure, Insecure is the Issa Rae created and executive produced, is it a comedy, a comedy, a dramedy.

Kelundra Smith:

It's a comedy.

Amena Brown:

Okay, a comedy series. We are on the fifth season on HBO. We are on the fifth and final season this year. And the way that I feel my feelings about this final season, it's a combination of feelings. I feel so proud of Issa Rae and this empire that she has built. Many of us were following her back when she was making Awkward Black Girl. That was actually my first introduction to her, her YouTube series, Awkward Black Girl. So just seeing her rise and her glow up has just brought me so much joy. And then seeing these characters and actors, some of whom we didn't know at all five seasons ago and seeing them rise and go on into these wonderful places in their career. I feel the sentimentality about that.

Amena Brown:

I feel my feelings about the way they left us in season four and now coming back into season five and they're taking their sweet time because I have a lot of questions that need to be answered. What are your things you just love about Insecure, the things that have made you mad as far as how they be leaving us on these cliffhangers? Let's just have a little old moment to Insecure.

Kelundra Smith:

So I love Insecure because when it came out, it was one of the only comedies that really started to unpack millennial life, you know what I mean? And really kind of explore ... Even though, yes, it is specifically a group of Black millennials, I have plenty of friends who are not Black who are like, "Yes, I see myself in these characters." And I think that that's really a feat for any writer. So shout out to Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore for really crafting these characters that have a universality to them but also a cultural specificity. And they always seem to hit the right note with that somehow. It's the bullseye every time that's such an achievement. I still find myself most drawn to unpacking and loving the friendship between Molly and Issa and watching it evolve and watching it change. Because we've all lived through that how you have somebody who you were so close to and even enmeshed with and then you get older and you grow apart and there's still love there, but it's not this saying.

Kelundra Smith:

Between them, we're seeing this lingering thing of will they get it back, how long will it last? When does the shoe drop? And can they grow and get better together? I love the way they're stringing us along with this. And I think it's so well done. Because it's been so long between season four and now, I forgot just how hilarious and ridiculous Insecure can be sometimes. When Issa is rapping to herself in the mirror and having those moments, I'm just screaming, I'm laughing so hard. And then also shout out to Natasha Rothwell who is really-

Amena Brown:

Big shouts, big shouts. Natasha, I know you listen to HER With Amena Brown, and we need you on here as a guest. I want you to come on here and do she funny episode because you're amazing. Okay, continue.

Kelundra Smith:

She amazing. Natasha Rothwell as Kelly on Insecure is comic genius, I want a Kelly spinoff.

Amena Brown:

Period, period.

Kelundra Smith:

Her whole life in the universe is just so wild. Speaking of which, we didn't really know Natasha Rothwell prior to Insecure. She was around but we didn't know her as a household name. Now, Natasha is everywhere, she's writing everything. I will still never get over, there is an episode I will not give away. I can't remember whether it was the last season or the season before, it just takes place in a diner and it is autumn.

Amena Brown:

Okay, period, period, that's exactly what I was thinking about and I was like-

Kelundra Smith:

Takes place in a dinner.

Amena Brown:

Wow, wow, have never seen anything like that on TV. I watched that episode multiple times just to be like, she really acted this, she really did that.

Kelundra Smith:

She acted the heck out of it. Special shout out to Amanda Seales for playing a character who is nothing like her. Because we forget sometimes that even though Amanda Seales' physical appearance is a stereotype of a character she plays, she herself is nothing like that's. And so to be able to pull off the of the character of Tiffany is really, really awesome. And then I've always been Team Daniel in terms of Issa's men. I like a man who shows up, he's always when you call, always on time to quote our good sister Ashanti.

Amena Brown:

Okay, okay, come on and quote Ashanti today.

Kelundra Smith:

I'm here for it. As we're seeing kind of Nathan and Issa back in each other's lives, I'm like, what's going on?

Amena Brown:

It's not you, you're voting no on that, voting no.

Kelundra Smith:

I don't want to give nothing away. What do you think Amena?

Amena Brown:

First of all, I'm not going to lie about it that I really want her and Lawrence to work out. I'm not going to lie that I still have small amounts of hopes about that. I don't want to spoil how this season is going so far if you have not been watching Insecure. But the way season four ended I was happy with it until the many names that Black Twitter has made up for Condola's character. I was happy with it until Condoleezza announced that she was pregnant. And I was like, oh, this really adds a wrinkle to some things. So I feel like there's a part of me that just feels they kept having an issue of wrong place wrong time, her and Lawrence as far as their lives and where they were at.

Amena Brown:

And having had such a long relationship through a really difficult time that you have in your 20s when you're trying to find yourself and what your work, life, what that purpose in your life is going to be like. And them feeling they could come back to each other because they were coming more into themselves. And then to have this sort of thing that is a blessing but is also a wrench to their relationship, sad. So if that ain't going to be, then I kind of am curious about Nathan just because I felt he brought out this different side of Issa.

Amena Brown:

There's the scene when they were doing the tour through LA and went and did the little skinny dip in the pool together. I was kind of like, look at him, bringing out this little adventurous side, encouraging her to start her block party situation. I might be team Nathan on that but maybe I need to now be texting you on Sundays after these episodes come on because I feel I'm sitting in my house yelling and having a lot of feelings and then not having anyone to speak to about it.

Kelundra Smith:

I audibly yell at the TV when Insecure is on, I'm like, Molly. It's always Molly.

Amena Brown:

I'm like, don't just change your hair, change your life, change your life, it's what we want for you.

Kelundra Smith:

That to be on a t-shirt. That's the t-shirt right there.

Amena Brown:

Don't just change your hair, change your life, okay. Period, poo period. We have so many other things we can talk about about Insecure, but shout out to Insecure, shout out to Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis.

Kelundra Smith:

Princess Penny.

Amena Brown:

Shout out to Princess Penny, just out to everybody on Insecure, we just appreciate y'all. That's a show that I feel when this is over I'll probably still have times I'll watch back through the whole thing like I do The Office. It's going to live in that sort of feeling, and I love that for them. Let me close our episode by talking about something very important, favorite Real Housewives franchise. My assistant Leigh said that you and I cannot get on here and talk about TV without her hearing from us our favorite Real Housewives franchise. Talk to me Kelundra, tell me the things.

Kelundra Smith:

So let me just say this, I have been a New Jersey diehard for a very long time because if we're going to wade through trash, then let's wade through the trash that fights at a baby's christening because you don't get lower. These people have been to prison, everybody got a lawsuit. New Jersey had me. But then across the country 2,000 miles away, Salt Lake City has come in and our sister Jen, I don't know whether it's Jen Shah or Mary, but my goodness, they have taken it for me, I am here for it. Who knew that in the land of snow and mountains there was so much Versace and so much nonsense. None of the math maths with how they make their money, it just must be that the cost of living in Salt Lake has to be low. We got charges pending against at least two of them. They're all creating LLCs on ink file that don't make no sense at all. It's like, what is this company that your sons have created, Lisa, why are you funneling VIDA TEQUILA money through your children?

Amena Brown:

Because like, you going to put a business on the babies too, sis, what we doing, dog?

Kelundra Smith:

Like what is this skincare product that Whitney claims to have? What is this stripper pole? How come she can't hold a cake?

Amena Brown:

That baby can't hold a cake at all. Bless her little heart, she can't. She can't hold nobody's cake. If it was my birthday, if she was my friend, I would be like, "Let the baker bring the cake in here, I don't want you lifting a cake, period. No, thank you."

Kelundra Smith:

Can you imagine that being your stepmom and she's like 30, I just can't. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, it's just so much filler, so much bow ties, so much designer.

Amena Brown:

Very much plunged.

Kelundra Smith:

But they be dressing, they be dressing. And then I have just questions about our sister Mary, I sent her prayers. Her life don't make any sense to me.

Amena Brown:

At all, at all, no sense-

Kelundra Smith:

I want her to rent up her house because that green carpet is ugly, but we love her.

Amena Brown:

The math is not being arithmetic regarding Mary's money because this grandmother with the churches and the restaurants and there being so much money that the grandmother is like, "You got to marry my husband when I die so that this ..." Then when I look at the church when they had this scene of them in the church, I was like, I don't really see where the money is coming from for you to be dressing the way you dress having this closet like this. It was a perfect combination of casting here on this show to me because I would've been expecting just a cast full of women who were either Mormon or formally Mormon. And the combination of there being some women who are still die hard Mormon, some women who are like, "Was Mormon, but I'm not anymore."

Amena Brown:

Mary is here with her Pentecostal Holiness, whatever she's doing. And then Jen Shah is here just not really connected to either of these religions all that much really. It was the perfect combination bringing those two together. And this season right here just leaving me hanging on is Jen Shah getting arrested on camera. I'm literally watching every week to be like, what's happening? Special shout out to that, I thought it was going to be boring, it's totally been the best.

Kelundra Smith:

No, they have brought the heat. And let me just say that Whitney need to leave Lisa alone. Go find you some business and get out of Lisa's.

Amena Brown:

Wearing me out, I'm worn out.

Kelundra Smith:

I'm worn out by you, it's like, leave Lisa alone. If she's as mean as y'all say she is, it will show on camera, but I haven't seen it yet.

Amena Brown:

I can't. And other people walk up and they be like, "You're the best, Lisa, I'm so glad to know you." And I'm like, I need some proof out here. Like When Real Housewives of Atlanta had the Bolo incident and we had the little camera that was still left in the house after the crew left, y'all need one of those. If this is really Lisa, I need her on that grainy black and white GoPro that y'all left somewhere so that I can be like ... I need to hear the audio even if I don't see the video, I need some proof. My choice, I mean equally Salt Lake City honestly, but I have to give a shout out to Real Housewives of Potomac right now, I have to.

Amena Brown:

And I feel some type of way because Real Housewives of Atlanta was my entry into the franchise, and I never would've thought I would say Salt Lake City and Potomac are better shows than Real Housewives of Atlanta. As of this recording, Real Housewives of Atlanta is in turmoil regarding casting. I think they have just begun filming as of this recording and some new cast members and some old cast members back and somebody getting peaches that didn't have a peach before. And I'm like, y'all really have a lot to prove to me. you could not have told me that Giselle and Candace and Robyn and Karen Huger the Grand Dame, you could not have told me that these characters from Potomac would outshine Real Housewives of Atlanta. I unfortunately live for how Candace cannot control her mouth in these situations. It's like once she hits a level of she done got mad, she can't bring it back.

Amena Brown:

Her husband trying to bring it back and she cussing him out while he's picking her up by the waist to carry her out somewhere. Mia and her husband G are just taking me all the way out. G on brown liquor should never be filmed by anyone. When he got the liquor in him, I was like, are you licking your tongue out at Karen, what are you doing, dog? But I appreciate about Mia and G that when the other ladies try to shade them about how they met or about what Mia was doing that she, whatever she termed what she was doing, she was exotic dancing, she was exotic bartending, whatever she said she was doing. I love how when the people try to shade them that they just own right up to it, it kind of takes the venom out of it that she's like, "Yeah, maybe I was near pole. Well, anyways, I'm here now with my little businesses. So say what you want to say." I live for this every week. Let me tell you something about Wendy Osefo because I don't know what-

Kelundra Smith:

And her fine husband Eddie.

Amena Brown:

I'm not sure what this booty and these titties brought to Wendy, but this is not the same Wendy from before she had these titties and this booty. And look, it ain't no shade, if that baby want to have that booty and them titties, she welcome to have it. But whatever happened to her when she was up under that anesthesia, somebody else came out from that because she be saying she going to be Zen Wen on the TV show but the next scene she is the opposite of Zen Wen. She is turning up on these people and it's such a filthy read. when she read Giselle in one of the most recent episodes that she thought Giselle was, not just thought, when Giselle was talking down her husband, the way she read Giselle, I was like, this is beyond reading Giselle's outfits. If I was Giselle, I really need a moment to myself to contemplate my life, oh my gosh.

Kelundra Smith:

Giselle stay getting read though, she getting read. She get a good read about twice a season. It is, it's true. That light skin tribunal of Robyn, Giselle and Karen-

Amena Brown:

I don't want you to tell me the light skin tribunal.

Kelundra Smith:

Each one of them just be putting the target on their back. They stay getting a healthy read from somebody because, first of all, coming for Eddie is not the answer because we love Eddie. Eddie is a successful doctor, Eddie is fine, hey Eddie. I would've come at Giselle for saying something about Eddie too is what I'm saying. And then Mia and her husband, their math does math right. They don't have to be bothered by the insults. We all know it's a joint chiropractic in every summer, and that's what they own. So they don't have to be bothered by, oh, you met this way or that way because they have receipts.

Amena Brown:

Period, they will get you adjusted. Didn't Mia tell her she would help you get adjusted, please.

Kelundra Smith:

Adjusted, okay. And then Candace stayed digging her own grave. I be trying to feel for Candace, but I can't, it's-

Amena Brown:

She don't make it easy on us, she don't make it easy on us. Even after everything, spoiler alerts if you haven't seen the previous season, but even after everything that happened with her and Monique, I was like, here you go, we in a new season and you starting to use your mouth the same way. And if you're going to use it against Mia, I think Mia is bigger and stronger. You in the ring with Mia, you're going to see what The Rock is cooking, you know what I'm saying? Mia, you don't want that. You little bitty literally this big sis, you don't want it. Mia could really accidentally hit you, and that's all.

Kelundra Smith:

No, Mia's left titty is bigger than Candace.

Amena Brown:

Okay, okay, please, please.

Kelundra Smith:

It's like Candace, calm down, why are you so mad? Also the way Candace comes for people, the vitriol that just comes out of her mouth, that's a learned skill. I don't know where that comes from. Sis need to lay down on a sofa somewhere and work that out.

Amena Brown:

I know it come from, it come from that mama honey. That is from her mama all day long. I was like you have been in therapy trying to get this relationship right with your mama, but you don't realize that lady raised you. That same thing that she hit you with, you do it to other people too. That is her mom all day, that ability to so quickly insult you and insult you at a point that she knows what's going to hurt you like that. I was like, Candace, dog, stop. Even when Chris pulled her out, Chris sat the girl on his lap trying to explain to her these are the reasons why we don't need to respond this way. And she was literally still cussing him to the end. I was like, Candace, please, are we going to go back to the therapist to have some sessions with him on camera so we can see what Natasha Rothwell taught us is growth, are we going to see that?

Kelundra Smith:

Listen, she got to want to change, that's the thing. She got a warning, and I don't think she wants it right now. But she's going to want it at some point, she's going to want it, she is, but it's just not today.

Amena Brown:

I'm going to tell y'all right now-

Kelundra Smith:

She got that ponytail on and that mouth is moving.

Amena Brown:

Period. I'm going to tell y'all right now that I might really have to convince Kelundra to get on IG live with me when it comes to these reunions because the Potomac and the Salt Lake City reunions is about to be so very wild. And I don't know, Kelundra, we might have to work it out because I feel I need to process what I'm seeing here, I feel like other people need to. So we might need to circle back around because when the reunions come, then I'm going to have to have a lot more conversation because I know I saw some clips of Wendy having printed out some tweets on a large poster board.

Kelundra Smith:

On a poster.

Amena Brown:

I'm just like, oh, this is what I need. Kelundra, thank you so much for talking all this TV with me, there was so much good TV. We had to narrow down what we were going to talk to y'all about. But Kelundra, please tell the people how can they follow you, stay connected to you so they can be a part of the other creative things that you're up to?

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, thank you so much. So it's Kelundra Smith, K-E-L-U-N-D-R-A, last name Smith, S-M-I-T-H. And you can find me on my website at kelundra.com, that's K-E-L-U-N-D-R-A, .com. You can also follow me on Instagram at anotherpieceofkay, that's kay with K-A-Y And there's also Twitter at pieceofKay. So Twitter at pieceofkay, Instagram at anotherpieceofkay. And then you can know that all I tweet about is the foolishness we talked about today. All my tweets are about some foolishness I've seen or some foolishness I've done. So for please come and follow and get your life and have some fun on these interwebs.

Amena Brown:

Please. Oh my gosh, y'all go follow, do all the things. Kelundra, I thank you. Maybe we'll have to make a yearly tradition of this. Maybe next year we'll be able to actually be in-person with snacks. We can bring snacks to the HER living room when we talk about 2022 TV. Let's plan on that.

Kelundra Smith:

Yes, I'm here for it, I'm here for this being an annual thing. And I'm here for going live for reunions because let me tell you my reunion tradition is serious. We've got popcorn, we've got Prosecco.

Amena Brown:

Yes, popcorn and Prosecco?

Kelundra Smith:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

I'm ready, honey. Me and Kelundra are going to talk about that offline, we're going to figure out some plans. So y'all be following us on social media in case we try to surprise y'all. Kelundra, thank you so much. 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.

Transcription: HER With Amena Brown Episode 58

Amena Brown:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of HER with Amena Brown and I'm so excited to have my grandma in the HER Living Room.

Amena Brown:

Grandma, welcome.

Grandma:

Thank you. I'm so blessed and excited.

Amena Brown:

Y'all, I'm so excited about this. I just realized recently, because I felt like sometimes my podcasts merge into one and I felt like that I had had you on this podcast, grandma, but then I remembered that you and I did an episode for my limited edition podcast, How To Fix A Broken Record, which was related to my book. And we did that episode because I dedicated the book to you and mom and my great grandma, which was your mom, right?

Grandma:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

And we had a wonderful time talking and we got all these questions that people wanted to ask. You actually had so many that we didn't get to cover them all. So we're going to do a little bit of an Ask Grandma situation where people can ask you questions and then I might ask some of my own as well.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So I wanted to start by asking someone had a really great question for you. They want to know what was your favorite childhood memory?

Grandma:

I have two distinctly. First is my bicycle. I love to ride the bicycle and I even think I could ride one today, but you all let me get on it, won't let me try out.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, that's right.

Grandma:

...to the beach. So I didn't try. But anyway, I only had in the family, but we only had in the family, my father's bicycle, my brother's bicycle. And of course, they were from men and boys. And so my daddy saw me one day and I almost fell on his cross bar. That's the difference between the male by itself and the female. And so he said, "Bird, I'm going to buy you a girl's bicycle." And I was so glad.

Grandma:

And at that time we were poor but we didn't know we were poor because we had everything everybody else had. And he came home one day with the bicycle. He said, I had it painted for you. It's secondhand. It didn't matter to me. It did the same job. And I could go to my grandma's house after my daddy came home at lunch time, my brother and I would get on the bicycle in the summertime and we'd go a couple blocks to my grandma's house and hid over there. We ate at our house with my dad and then we went to my grandmother's house and ate with her and her family. And she had a long table, a lot of them and when they would come in at lunchtime, then we eat there and then my brother brought it back home.

Amena Brown:

Oh.

Grandma:

And we just enjoyed it. I got lots of exercise. And the second childhood memory of what I love to do. I walked about five miles maybe, on the Saturday morning, a girlfriend and I, I wanted to take piano lessons. My mother and my grandfather played the organ. And for some reason, being with my mother in the choir and everything, I just decided I wanted to take piano lessons so I could play for the choir. Didn't even know a note. So my teacher at school was a music teacher and I asked her, would she teach me? And she said, yes.

Grandma:

She said, "But you'll have to come on down to where I live in the Southern part of town." And it was about five miles every Saturday there and every and five miles back.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

And my girlfriend and I both went. Then she moved and went to another school and I had to find another teacher. So I got a teacher from the church. I was determined I was going to learn how to play the piano. So I learned the keyboard. And after that, God just filled me in with different things. I really can't play all that much. But after I get started, nobody cannot play me, whatever song I'm playing.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Grandma:

And for 50 years I played for junior choirs, senior choirs, organized a mail course at my church in North Carolina. And then when I went to Texas, I played for the children's choir there and we just had fun and I've been satisfied. Whatever your dream is and your hope, just know that you can't acquire them with God's help. Just have to love the Lord and be patient.

Amena Brown:

That's right. See, I don't think I ever heard that story about you walking five miles each way to your piano lessons initially, because of course, by the time I came along, I was just going to the choir practice with you and going with you and you were playing for the choirs and y'all would I tell you, my grandma could bang that piano know honey, ooh. I mean, I have some little short videos on my social media of you playing our piano at our house now, but that's one of my favorite childhood memories of you is being in the choir stand with you. Any of you that are listening that grew up in churches that had a choir, you had a choir stand and so the piano in your church was up near where the choir stand was. So I would sit up there next to you and then the choir was there. So it's really wonderful to me to hear how determined you were to learn how to play. And then you learning how to play so young, you were able to play for the choirs when you were a teenager.

Grandma:

I was about 13.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

And at that time there weren't too many young ladies or men playing. There was a few here and there. And now, I even went from Goldsboro, I went to Kingston, Snowhill and Rockmount and LaGrange and played for those people's junior choir. And the people bought handbooks for their children because I was limited with what I could play. But if I found somebody in the choir that really had a good voice, I would select songs for them to learn and I would teach them how to do. And we had the churches rocking.

Amena Brown:

I know you did, honey. I remember that. Wow, that was some good times right there, grandma. Okay. Someone wants to know what is the most embarrassing story that you can share about me?

Grandma:

The only, really I didn't have anything embarrassing. I had some things that I maybe couldn't cope with every night. You a reader. You love to read and I would take it to the library once a week and used to select a book for every day, seven books. And at that time you was in the first grade and they had a books club that if whoever read the highest amount of books would get a special gift, but it was a hundred book club that they wanted you all to belong to. And so, I took you and then whenever your cousins would come, I took them too, and that gave me a chance to look at all the magazines, fashion magazines, reading New York Times and the Washington Post that I couldn't afford to buy. And I would just sit there and stay as long as I needed to and you all read books while you were there, then you will select your seven that you going to take home and we take them home.

Grandma:

And the next week we bring them back to the library. You'd have to buy them. And now I have great grandchildren now whose our parents do the same thing for them. They take them to the library. They don't go and buy a whole lot of books. If they get one for a gift it's okay. But, and when I go to visit them, I sit in the library with them while their parents go and do whatever they need to do. And I just read all kinds of books and look at all the pictures that I want to look at while we are there.

Amena Brown:

I loved that. That's one of my favorite memories of reading with you. But I think the embarrassing part y'all that grandma was going to tell y'all is that when my grandma goes to bed at night and now that I'm older, I'm this way too. But when my grandma goes to bed at night, she don't want to see not a crack of light. It needs to be-

Grandma:

Dark.

Amena Brown:

...utter darkness. The darkness be before God made the world, dark. Okay? That's what my grandma needs it to be. So when I would visit you, or when I was living with you for that year of first grade, you would be like, "Listen, I love for you to read. You can read all the books you want, but if you going to read out loud with this light on you going to go sleep in another room."

Grandma:

And we had three bedrooms in our apartment.

Amena Brown:

You would tell me, "You going to go in one of those other rooms, because in here it's going to be no light."

Grandma:

You had a choice. You could go to the blue room. The, well the other one, the beige, wait, your mother loved. Well, she loved didn't cover. I think I said red. I don't remember now. But anyway, there was other one and it didn't matter to me which one you chose, but your mother and your uncle had already left high school and they were in college. And so you had a choice except for my room.

Amena Brown:

It wasn't going to be no choices in grandma's room. She lets you know, that's that. Okay, somebody wants to know grandma, looking back to your years of raising a teenager or teenagers or just raising children at all, what would you do the same? What would you do differently? What insight would you give to your younger mom-self?

Grandma:

I will let them know that education is next to godliness in our home. And I didn't want you to lie to me. I didn't want you to steal from me because whatever I had, if you wanted it just ask for it. And I took y'all to the library, to other trips and different things so you could experience, exposure is the best thing for children.

Grandma:

Exposure, I'd already made in my mind and asked God, let me be able to live to see my children grow up to finish high school and college and my grandchildren. Now I'm seeing my great-grand children go to college. Got one in college now that's 20 years old and the other four are small. Everybody has had a taste of college life so far. Most of them have got a degree from the BS to the PhD. And a law degree. So I'm just satisfied and God answered my prayer and our patience, but it was something you have to do. You have to motivate them. And let them know that you're serious and encourage them. And if they make a low mark, that's okay. You help them instead or give them your attention and they'll want to please you and you just make a lot over it.

Amena Brown:

Let's dig into some of these questions now. Somebody wants to know grandma, did you sing any special songs to your children or your grandchildren? And if so, what are they?

Grandma:

No, I didn't sing any special songs.

Amena Brown:

I don't remember any song. I remember learning some hymns with you.

Grandma:

Oh yeah. Well, I took you to choir rehearsal and you said that what I played for the choir and I sang those same songs on Sunday morning. Just So Sweet To Trust In Jesus and Working For The Lord Will Pay Off, I even played that in Texas when I went and taught the children there. And the people just fell in love with it. And today I can truly say working for the Lord will pay off after a while. Just have patience. Just have patience with your children and with God. You got to love God and you got to have patience with God. He promised never to leave us or forsake us. But he didn't promise to give us what we want every time we ask.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Grandma:

I know he hears our prayers and answer them. But he may not answer some of them until we are gone from this world. But he will answer them.

Amena Brown:

That's powerful grandma to have patience with God also. That's powerful, grandma. Okay, let's ask about this. You talked about your dreams and hopes for your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren. What were your dreams for yourself when you were a little girl or a young woman?

Grandma:

I wanted to play the piano. I was a mother of four children and I was busy and my husband liked to travel. So we traveled from North Carolina to Indiana to DC to Georgia. And we just exposed the kids to whatever we could expose them to. I never thought about working really. I was a mother and a housekeeper, but later on I did go to work and I worked with children at the mental hospital in Goldsboro for almost 30 years. I worked for 28 years there.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

And I taught those children and I treated them with love. And I learned so much from them to know how to raise my kids. My two oldest boys were 10 and 12 when I started working for the state. And then my last two were five and seven. And working with those kids and I organized a choir at the hospital.

Amena Brown:

I don't think I knew that, Grandma.

Grandma:

Well, I don't know. I have to let you talk to some people that can tell you how we went places and sang at churches and on TV.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

We were even on TV.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

I just took the children whoever, when they went outside, I was the one that always wanted to go with the children to the football game or when they would learn how to pay tennis. I couldn't hardly run a whole lot, but I could hit that ball and get one of the other kids to run for me. And I got along fine with them.

Amena Brown:

I love that, Grandma. Okay, this question, to give a little background to everyone, when I perform on stage and any of you that have read my books, I think I've told this story about my great-grandmother which is, my grandma's mom and she used to have a phrase that she would say when it would storm or when it was raining, she would tell us that we had to be still and be quiet while God was doing his work.

Grandma:

That's right.

Amena Brown:

So someone wants to know, how do you be still and be quiet while God is working?

Grandma:

I do the same thing. If it's storming, I relax. Sometimes I go to sleep, close my door, pull the shades down or close the curtains and I be quiet. And I did that when the kids were in high school and I now do the same thing for my grandchildren when they come. And thank God where I live now, I don't have a lot of windows. And so, I have a inner closet that I, walk in closet, I can go in and there are no windows in there. And I can just pray and just wait until the God gets through doing his work of a storm. He does his work all the time with the sun shining and the moon shining.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Grandma:

They never go out.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. That's a good point too, that God is working even beyond when it's raining or storming. But it is an interesting point, grandma just hearing you say that even today, when it rains or storms that you might just go to your room and have some time to lay down to yourself because a lot of younger people are talking about what are the ways we can give ourselves more peace, more stillness, find these moments to have that quiet in our soul because our lives can be so noisy.

Amena Brown:

And when I was a child and grandma, who was your mom, when I would stay with her, when you would go to work at the hospital and I would stay with her, honey, if it rain, she was unplugging everything in that house, turned off all the lights and was like, "I don't care who's in here. Everybody in here is going to lay down until the storm's over. And now of course, as a child, I found that to be very annoying because I was in the middle of whatever I was doing playing, I didn't understand that. But now I'm thinking of myself, grandma, I might try to practice it too. I might not go as far as Grandma Sudi did. I might not unplug everything like she did.

Grandma:

I don't unplug everything.

Amena Brown:

But I might try sometimes when it's raining like that, just to give yourself a moment to be unplugged from things and give yourself some time of quiet. I think that's a really good-

Grandma:

And you could pray in and thank God for your life for today because you don't know what most tomorrow's going to bring.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Grandma:

And there's always something to pray for. And there's always something to thank God for. That's what I did. And that's what I do now.

Amena Brown:

This is the question I have that I want to ask you to just give some clarity and some history for us. Okay, so you were growing up in the Pentecostal Holiness Church And in that time in the church that you were growing up in, women were not allowed to wear pants. Women were supposed to wear skirts. You were not supposed to be wearing makeup, listening to what would be considered secular music or worldly music.

Amena Brown:

You weren't supposed to go to the movies, you were supposed to really be for what the church had decided at that time, doing holy your things.

Grandma:

You are right.

Amena Brown:

Well, as I have talked to your children and then having been your granddaughter myself, you have had some moments in your life that you decided you could have your relationship with God, but you didn't have to always be in the box of what other people decided, they said everybody should be doing. So when I was a little girl, you were wearing pants.

Grandma:

Amen.

Amena Brown:

And a couple of your children told me, you let them go to the movies. Sometimes you would send them wherever downtown or wherever they would go. You would allow them to go to the movies. So can you discuss with us what made you decide to do those things?

Grandma:

Yes. When I started working for the children's unit at the hospital, the kids had record class, just like they were, if they were at home. They had a schedule and they had activities. We had music classes for them and so forth. So when they had to go outside, a lot of people wanted to stay inside, look at TV or listen to the radio or they had snacks and whatever. There were always some kids that couldn't go because maybe they had an injury or maybe because they might would've run away from the people that would take them outside. So I would always volunteer to take them outside. I was a healthcare technician too. And I went outside to let the other ones that would help care technicians one, let them know that nobody needed to be excluded. You could go and have fun with the children.

Grandma:

We took snacks and they could listen to music on the bus. And then I just liked getting away. But one day we had to have a baseball game on the campus of the hospital and I was out there and I was probably about, maybe I was 50 years old. Might not have quite been 50. Anyway, I decided, coming up as a child, I didn't play a lot of sports any kind of sports really. I didn't like football because it was too cold. I didn't like going to football games and my parents didn't go to any of them. My dad would listen to the boxers when, and the wrestling people when they'd be on the radio. But until I was 13, we didn't even have a TV in our home because they said that was the devil's music boss or whatever it was.

Grandma:

But later on we did get one, like everybody else had. So this day I went with the kids outside and they were playing ball and they said, "Ms. Lee come on, you can hit that ball." And one little child told me said, "If you hit it, I'll run for you." I said, "Okay." So I did hit the ball. I was pretty good, my eyesight was good and I could hit that ball and they would run for me. But this one time, oh, before they said they would run for me, I tried to run myself, but I fell down.

Amena Brown:

Oh.

Grandma:

Oh, I fell down and my dress came up and the cheers laughed at me.

Amena Brown:

Oh no.

Grandma:

Yes they did. Oh, most other ladies had on slacks. But I had on my dress right on and my jacket and whatever. And so I was determined that day that you were not laughing me again because you can see under my dress. I'm going to go and get me some pants.

Grandma:

So I went downtown and I bought me several pairs and I decided I would wear them to work, not changing when we had activity and wear them to the cafeteria and whatever. And some of my church members, maybe they didn't belong to my church, but they belong to some other church.

Grandma:

All they knew I belonged to the Holiness Church and they said I was being shameful.

Amena Brown:

Oh.

Grandma:

Not respecting the way the holdings people supposed to do. You been taught better than that. You all don't believe in wearing pants. She wasn't holding this person, but she was a minister and most times she wore dresses. But she didn't have to, that was up to her. And then I got thinking back that if I had kept riding the men bicycle, I would've had to go pass anyway. But having a girls bicycle, it didn't bother me. And so, right in the cafeteria one day, she came in and I had on pants. She had never seen her pants before. And when people see you doing things that you don't usually do, they haven't seen you do, they say you're back sliding.

Amena Brown:

Oh no! Back sliding, honey. No!

Grandma:

She said I was back sliding. And if you wore makeup and you hadn't been doing that, oh, you were back sliding. You being like the worldly people.

Amena Brown:

No. My my my.

Grandma:

And so, I just told her nicely that, that would be my wear from now on. From then on, when I chose, I would wear pants the work. And if I wanted to wear a dress, I would wear a dress. But if I didn't, I'd wear slacks. And so before I knew it, maybe few months later, and even maybe a few years later, the ministers were wearing pantsuits at work.

Amena Brown:

My, my.

Grandma:

I mean, at church, wearing pantsuits and a lot of the Christian ladies, instead of walking in the neighborhood to get exercise, they were riding bicycles. And so, I was just in the know.

Amena Brown:

Come on, now. And when you learn better, you have to do better, okay? Okay, it's not a lie, grandma. Come on, I was in the know. Yes. Yes, I mean, we love a little stunt of the people. Okay, let me do one last question here. This person wants to know, what is your advice for people in relationships? And you had a marriage to the father of your children, you were married to him until he passed away. And then you decided to live the rest of your life single. So tell us the things. What would you say as having been married yourself as well as having been single yourself, what advice would you give to people in their relationships?

Grandma:

Well, you choose for yourself. With me, my husband and I loved each other. And even though some of that time, he was in different, like I said, he loved to travel. So when he wanted to travel and stay to a place too long, maybe I would go back to North Carolina. If I saw he was having a hard time getting a job that he could support us. And I would go back home and put him in school. Then whenever he said, "Let's move again." I will move again. And when my girlfriend used to say, she had finished college and she used to say, "Bert, every time I come to Goldberg, you pregnant." But I had four children and he had a medical disability for the military. And so, my children and I had base privileges because he didn't want them to give him lump sum for his injury.

Grandma:

He was very smart and intelligent and he just wanted base privileges so we would never have to go to a private doctor until the kids were too old. And I even use it right on now, instead of my medicine costing, expensive medicine, I would get it for the less than half price.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Grandma:

And I like that. And then of course, I can get Medicaid and I retire from Children's Hospital and I moved my daughter and I don't have to buy anything. Before I can even look in the cupboard or the refrigerator, she's done already bought it most of the time. And if not, I let my grandchildren know, my children know that I would not have so and so and so, and before I know anything, they send it to me. Like a walking cane, my granddaughter in-law sent me a walking cane because she wanted to know what did I do for exercise.

Grandma:

And I told her that I walk a little bit but I don't walk too much because of the dogs. So she sent me a fold up walking cane, so I could use it being out the dogs. But I never did. I told her if a dog would come close to me, I'd probably run and maybe throw the stick at a dog. And they would, I don't know what I would do. But anyway, I got other interests. My grandson went to West Point, but before he did that, of course, he learned how to play basketball. I escorted him with his other grandmother and we went from city to city to take him. So there are a lot of things that you can get involved in without just not having anything to do. People ask me sometime, even now, are you bored? No, I'm not bored.

Grandma:

I talk to people in Texas, California. I'm still in relationship with people that I learned and met while I was on trip with you when you were doing conferences a lot. I would go with you and your husband. And so, and my daughter would go with us. There's so many things you can do, but you have to have a relationship with someone and an understanding. And you have to also be true to yourself and your God.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Grandma:

You know you're not going to do everything because you're human. And God knew that when he made us that we weren't going to do everything. And of course, because for Adam and Eve, I won't go back there right now. But anyway, I know that people can have relationship and you have to respect other people and don't argue about the Word or money. Don't argue about those two things.

Grandma:

And you have to respect other people. And then you reach up to be with someone in a class, or that's trying to reach for a higher heights than you always try to reach up to someone. If you see that your friendship with anyone is not the kind that you need to be, that's going to help you improve things and have patience and have faith. Faith and hope are two things that we have to live by. Not for what we see always, for what we aspire to be.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Grandma:

And we can reach those goals.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Grandma:

But you have to be positive. You have to be positive, and you have to be around positive people.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Grandma:

And whatever you desire, you can reach that goal.

Amena Brown:

Grandma, thank you so much. I love all these answers to these questions and y'all, maybe this won't be the last time we'll have grandma on the podcast answering things for us. But-

Grandma:

Thank you for considering me. I am blessed.

Speaker 3:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 57

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to back to another episode of HER with Amena Brown. And this week is a Behind the Poetry episode. And if you are used to listening to the podcast, if you are a part of our HER living room on a weekly basis, you know that normally I don't have guests for my Behind the Poetry episodes. But today I have a very special guest, without whom I wouldn't be her. My mom is here.

Amena Brown:

So today I'm taking y'all Behind the Poetry of my poem God Bless Mom, which obviously was inspired by my mom. I thought it would be fun if she came into the HER living room. How you doing, mom?

Jeanne Brown:

I'm doing good. Yeah. Into the HER living room. I am excited to be here. I've been waiting for this moment. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely intro. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Amena Brown:

And, y'all, the day of this recording, even though you will be hearing this weeks afterwards, but the day of this recording is actually my mom's birthday. She agreed that we could record this podcast on her birthday. So, happy birthday, mom. Hope you're having a good birthday so far.

Jeanne Brown:

Thank you. I am having a wonderful birthday. It started out real good. Real early and real good. And it's continuing on. The partying continues on.

Amena Brown:

That's right. In this family, we celebrate extended birthdays. So we have the actual day of one's birthday. And then one is able to decide if one wants to celebrate the entire month, or celebrate 30 days from one's birthday, or just make a year of it. We do all sorts of things. We love to see that. I'm so glad you're here on your birthday, mom.

Amena Brown:

So before we get into this poem, I want to talk to y'all about how my mom is responsible for me becoming a writer and a performer. And I think there might be a Behind the Poetry episode when I did Roots and Wings, where I may have told a little bit of this story. And I used to tell this story on stage all the time also. And whenever I've done interviews and people would ask why did I want to write poetry or what inspired me to become a spoken word poet, there's a very particular story about my mom that I tell.

Amena Brown:

My mom has been with me and heard me tell this story on stage before. But I've never had a moment where I could get my mom's side of the story for y'all to be able to hear this. So I want to start with this, mom, and then we'll go into the poem. And there are a few other questions around the poem that I want to ask you. But when I tell my side of the story, mom, I tell the people that the reason why I am a spoken word poet today is because you submitted me to a poetry competition without my knowledge. I want to start the beginning part of that is, do you recall telling me, as a teenager, that there was no privacy in your house? Do you remember saying that?

Jeanne Brown:

I do remember saying that. And I'm glad that I was that type of a mom, because also you all may not know, and let me know if you all have heard this story. You'll have to let her know, I guess, somehow. People can give you responses?

Amena Brown:

Yes.

Jeanne Brown:

But I started finding her poems when she was about 12 years old. And I would read them and I would be finding all these pieces of paper balled up and thrown in a trashcan. And I'm like, "Whose work is this? Who's doing this? Are you working on a project?" And so finally that's when I really realized that she was writing her own poems. But she did not feel comfortable yet sharing them. So yes, I do remember being that mom. I tried to make sure you had your own room and other things like that of your own. But I still am not ashamed of being that mom, because I didn't abuse it. I don't think I did anyway.

Amena Brown:

No. I don't think so either. She basically told me, "Listen here, if you have a notebook, you got some notes." Some of y'all listening are like, y'all are writing notes in class? Yes, because when I was in school we didn't have cell phones. We didn't have ways, electronically, to communicate to our friends. It was either the phone or handwritten notes.

Amena Brown:

So my mom basically let me know early on, if I find it, I'm reading it. If it's a notebook, if it's a folded up note, or whatever it is. And when I was doing stage shows, I would tell how there was a little boy I was writing. I must've been ... maybe I was a sophomore, probably junior year in high school. Because, fun fact, I went to Christian school for ninth and 10th grade, y'all, in San Antonio, Texas. And then I begged my mom to let me go to public school.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

If there had been PowerPoint presentations that I had access to then, I probably would've done a PowerPoint presentation to say to my mom, "Please let me go to public school." So she did. She let me go to public school my junior and senior year. So I graduated from Judson High School in San Antonio. Shout out to the Judson Rockets.

Amena Brown:

And my junior year ... This is how bad I was at science. I was taking a class called Chemistry for the Community. And there was a little boy in my class, Terrance, and he and I would write notes during class. And that's how I knew that you were really reading, because I came home from school one time and you were like, "Who's Terrance?" And I was like, "Oh, he's this boy in my chemistry class." And you were basically like, "Well I'm not sending you to school for that kind of chemistry. So you need to focus on your schoolwork. Okay."

Jeanne Brown:

Please.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So let's talk about you came upon some of my notebooks. I remember you came to me and told me that you had read some of the things that I had written. And you told me that you thought that they were good, that they were good pieces of writing. You were encouraging me to keep writing. But of course, like many kids, I just thought this is my mom, she's probably going to think whatever I write is so great.

Amena Brown:

So then I want to talk about the oratorical contest that used to happen at our church when I was growing up. I was growing up in a Black church in San Antonio.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

Shout out to New Creation Christian Fellowship. And every year there was an oratorical competition where you could compete, by either memorizing the work of other poets or other writers. Or you could write something yourself. And you were competing against your own age group. And I competed many years and never won. And mom, I would like you to speak to what your feelings were at that time, about why I wasn't winning or what you thought when we were driving away and I still was not winning higher honors in that competition.

Jeanne Brown:

Well first of all, I had to maintain my composure because I felt that every time you didn't win I felt that you didn't win because they didn't know about how good of a writer you were. But also, being a mom ... Now this is true. Being a mom, I just feel that my child should've won every contest. Even if you were doing Maya Angelou's poems or whoever poem you did, you should've just won the contest. It was an oratorical contest. And shout out to our church in San Antonio. They did encourage a lot with the arts, and I'm so grateful for that, for you, because you fit right in.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

So my feelings at that time, I had to keep my composure. My feelings were that you should've won. But also I feel that you would be more of a competitor if you would present your own writing. But I knew that you had already expressed that you didn't feel you wanted to share all your poems with people. So I kind of had to think about it. And then our youth pastor, he told me at the time about the contest.

Amena Brown:

Oh. See, I didn't know that.

Jeanne Brown:

Our youth pastor, which was Steve Tucker at the time, told me about the contest. Steve Tucker, was he the assistant or he was the actual youth pastor?

Amena Brown:

No, he was the assistant still.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

Because Elder Campbell was still the youth pastor then.

Jeanne Brown:

Okay.

Amena Brown:

But they were working together.

Jeanne Brown:

They were working together. And they had already told me about the contest, because I was a volunteer youth leader. So he told me about the contest and I was just like, okay. So Amena's going to present her poetry. I'm knowing. So I'm reminding you and I keep going back to him, finding out if he's heard anything, if he knows if you've submitted. And then I finally asked you again, had you submitted it. And you said, "No." And during that time ... which I am still a reader. During that time, I loved to read behind the scenes stories about other writers.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

And during that time, for whatever reason, I was reading a book. And I don't remember what book it was by Stephen King, but I was reading a book about Stephen King. I had read a book he'd written. But I was reading a book about him. And the story was, from his wife, that he majored in English. I may get some of the facts wrong. But he majored in English. He was a teacher, a professor or something like that. He hated it. And every time he would submit a book to a publisher he would get rejected.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

Well, when he wrote Carrie, and I'm sure a lot of these listeners out here have heard of the movie, Carrie. Well that's based on a book by Stephen King.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

Even though he had been rejected many times for other books, his wife found a manuscript in the trash. She took it out of the trash and she mailed it in. And that's literally the first time he actually got paid for a manuscript, a book. I guess whatever you would call the initial book. And he got paid for that. That put him on the map.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Jeanne Brown:

And I forget what it was. It was something like huge amount at that time. It was like $3,000. He got a book advance.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

So when I read that I was really inspired by that. So I just started doing more research on him and how he got to that point, and how his wife was frustrated at the time because she knew that he was a good writer but he just had never hit that one book. And Carrie was the book for him.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And we see Stephen King all over the place. So then I got thinking. I said, "I'm going to ask Amena one more time has she submitted her poetry."

Amena Brown:

Did not.

Jeanne Brown:

And she said, "No." And in her teenage way she was like, "No ma'am. I didn't." So I found out that they were at the office working. They were at the church office working that day and I could go up there and use the fax machine.

Amena Brown:

I didn't know about any of this. I'm going to have to circle back to them, that they were in cahoots with you. Because I didn't know about that. Okay. Continue.

Jeanne Brown:

So I had the forms all ready. It had her name, everything filled out. I knew some of her poems that we had printed out. So I just sent them in. Did not know she was going to win, but I had confidence that at least it was worth them seeing her poetry.

Amena Brown:

I do not remember you asking me about the contest in particular. I don't remember that part, maybe because I blocked it out and I had no intentions of entering. But I do remember you bringing up to me, repeatedly, that you wanted to see me doing more with my writing and stuff. And I just really did not feel confident about it. When I would memorize Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman, I could feel confident performing it because I knew I could get it down memorized and I could say it and everything, and do well on stage.

Amena Brown:

But something about the idea of my own work out there, I don't know. Something about that made me feel afraid. And it would just stunt me. I couldn't do anything. So anytime I'm imagining that you were asking me about this contest, in my mind I'm like no. Who else would like this poetry? That's how not confident I felt about it.

Amena Brown:

And the contest that my mom was submitting me for, that I didn't know she was submitting me for, was the NAACP ACT-SO competition. And ACT-SO was an acronym. And y'all, I'm so sorry that I cannot remember what all the words were. But I know it was like arts, another was science. There were different categories that you could submit yourself for. It had been a really big thing in the Black community because it gave a lot of students opportunities in these different areas, to be celebrated. And there was a local competition. But then if you won locally, then you would get a chance to also compete nationally. There was a national ACT-SO competition. So if you won in the science category in your local city, then all the winners from your local city would pool together. The community would pool together and raise money to help those kids, and the chaperones, get to where the national competition was.

Amena Brown:

So at the time that my mom is submitting this, I'm actually in my ... I wonder if that was my junior year, if that was before my senior year. That's what I think. I think that's what I'm thinking. I think it was the summer before my ... I can't remember if it was the summer before my senior year or if you submitted it my senior year and we went to ACT-SO the summer before I went to college. That's the part I can't remember.

Jeanne Brown:

I can't remember that part either. It was either the junior year or it was the summer before your senior year.

Amena Brown:

It ended up that nationals were in Atlanta, whatever year you submitted.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

And I'm going to circle back to how we discovered that I won the thing. But I ended up seeing Spelman, which y'all know, as listeners, that that is my alma mater. We didn't get to go actually on campus. But I did get to see Spelman's campus from afar. That was the closest I'd ever gotten until moving in.

Amena Brown:

Okay, so let's circle back into the story now. You went up to the church while my youth pastor and one of the other youth leaders were up there working, and faxed this entry into the competition.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So then when they say if you won or not, are they mailing it back to you? How did you find out? Or did they call you? How did you find out that I actually won the thing?

Jeanne Brown:

Well if I remember it correctly, I got a phone call. But also, I think they contacted one of the youth ministers. We'll have to ask them do they remember being contacted. But they contacted us by phone and by letter.

Amena Brown:

Okay.

Jeanne Brown:

Because the local chapter ... And I know it's hurting a lot of people that's hearing about that we faxed it and we got a phone call.

Amena Brown:

There wasn't no email, y'all, okay. We just barely had AOL at that time. And not everybody even had AOL. It couldn't be depended on.

Jeanne Brown:

Right. Right. So they sent a letter and they called.

Amena Brown:

Okay.

Jeanne Brown:

And that's when I was notified that you were selected and that they wanted your poem to be presented at the local ACT-SO contest, and that you were one of the finalists.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

And I had no idea what that was going to mean. I was just excited that someone had finally recognized your poetry.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

And that it was something other than me, that it was outside of me, even though I know I was kind of bootlegging by submitting it without your permission.

Amena Brown:

It worked out so I can't really hate on that. It worked out.

Amena Brown:

Okay, so my memory of how you told me that I won is that when you told me, it was pretty close to when I would've had to go there and read the poem. So in my memory, it felt like it was a Saturday. I know it was a Saturday when you had to go there, because all the community was going to gather together, all the different other kids that were finalists in all the different categories.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

I know it was on a Saturday. But I felt like you notified me ... I was finding out on a Wednesday. It was a couple days. But it wasn't that long between when you told me and when we were actually going to go to there. And you came to me so excited. You were like, "You won this contest. You won something. And so we have to go there. As a part of you winning something, we have to go there and you have to read them your poem." And as you were talking is when I'm starting to realize. Because I'm like, well how could I win something that I didn't submit anything for. And then the more you were talking to me I was like, oh she sent something of mine there and now that's the only way I can accept my winnings, my certificate, or whatever, trophy, whatever they were going to give all of us.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

And y'all, I know that my mom ... Some of you are my friends in real life, y'all know my mom in real life. And a lot of people, even some of you have met my mom at events because we travel together as well. And y'all meet my mom and y'all be like, "I love your mom. She's so sweet." Listen, I love my mom too. But I'm going to tell you right now that the lady that's on this podcast episode if very different from the lady that raised me. Okay.

Amena Brown:

So when she came to me and she said, "Hey, you won this." She didn't say, "Would you like to go to there on Saturday?" She was like, "We going on Saturday because you won this. And what going to go there and you're going to read your poems." And I want to tell y'all that I stood my ground and was like, "I will not go there." But I'm going to tell you that I was afraid of her a little bit. I was a afraid of her. Those of you that have Black mothers, you understand. There was a certain way. She didn't ask me no questions. So I knew there wasn't really no room to be having a discussion about that. It was like, "Hey, we going over there. So you got however many days between now and when that thing is to get yourself together to do this." So I was kind of mumbling under my breath a little bit. But when was like, "We going," I was like, "Yeah. No. Yeah. Sure. That sounds good. Let's do that."

Amena Brown:

So I get there and most of the people in the audience are not people that we know.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

Because it was a totally different cross-section of Black folks in San Antonio really. There weren't really a lot of people there that we went to church with, anybody. Most everybody there, they were not people that I remember us knowing. Right?

Jeanne Brown:

No. You're right. You're right.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So I went there. First of all, I didn't talk to y'all about this poem, and it's not going to be read over this podcast episode. But the poem that my mom found was this poem I had written called Chocolate Mister.

Jeanne Brown:

Ooh, yes.

Amena Brown:

So Chocolate Mister had been selected. I didn't remember the finalist part. So Chocolate Mister had been selected as a finalist and I had to go there and read it. And we were not finding out until we got there if I was actually the winner in that category. Is that how you remember it?

Jeanne Brown:

That's how I remember it.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So I read the poem. And y'all, all I can remember, I'm 17 at the time. So this was my senior year of high school, now that I'm remembering that. I'm 17. And I remember reading this poem, that I read to a lot of my friends. I wouldn't really read my poems in a public setting. If I was talking to my friends on the phone I would read it to them. Or sometimes when we were in between classes or something, or at lunch, I would read poem to them.

Amena Brown:

So I had read the poem several times by this time, but never in front of an audience, audience. So when y'all are remembering the Behind the Poetry episode for Roots and Wings, in Roots and Wings I'm telling, really the second time actually, that I think I ever really performed a poem of my own in a public setting.

Amena Brown:

Now I think that time, in Roots and Wings, when I was in Alabama at that bookstore, I had actually memorized Chocolate Mister by that time. So that was my first time ever saying one of my poems from memory in public.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

But this time, at the ACT-SO competition, was the first time I had ever read it in a public setting. So I had the papers in front of me and I was reading it. And all I can remember is seeing the adults leaning in when I was reading the poem. And I remember that feeling so fascinating to me because I just thought I'm 17, I'm a kid. These are grown folks who've read books and seen films. They've been exposed to art.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

They don't have any reason to be leaning in to what I have to say. And that was one of the first times that I felt like now that I'm here it's not as scary as I imagined it was going to be. And apparently maybe I do have something to say that is important enough that not just my friends from school, but grown people are enjoying this thing that I've written.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes. Absolutely.

Amena Brown:

So honestly y'all, my mom is completely responsible for me becoming a spoken word poet because that really was like I got bit by the bug then. Then it was like, oh now I see how these things I write are also to be performed, to be spoken, that that's also something that I can do well.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

So I think whenever I tell people this story, mom, I always tell them you really did a good job in that moment, of pushing me beyond my comfort zone. Because I never would have believed in myself or pushed myself to think that my work could do that or that I could do that. And the fact that you did that behind my back totally won out here, mom. That was a really good parenting choice. You got to give yourself a pat on the back about that.

Jeanne Brown:

Thank you. And one of the reasons why I wanted to do that, I think I was compelled because spiritually I kept remembering a time when I had listened to some person that was talking to us about parenting our children, during that time. And the person was encouraging us to know what y'all's dreams are and know what God was telling us about what your gifts were. And I saw that that was one of your gifts. I didn't know what it was going to turn into. But I knew that it was a gift.

Jeanne Brown:

You had other gifts too. You had other things that you like doing. But when I saw that, I just realized this is something and I have to try to help her get to this because she will have a chance to use it in other ways, if it's just you writing books or whatever, I didn't know how it was ready to be expressed. I just remember that person saying, "Always try to find out something about your child that they're good at."

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

And if they have a dream for something, then try to see if you, as a parent, can be in their dream with them, in your own way.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And that's what propelled me. And so of course, when I read that story about Stephen King, it was on.

Amena Brown:

Okay. One thing I have to say about you, mom, just of course now having 40 plus years of life having been your daughter. One thing I'll say about my mom, y'all, is my mom is a celebrator to the end. My mom is ready to cheer you on. You doing it? She's ready to support you. I always have this funny story and this memory I have of when I went from Christian to public school. Here's me showing up to this big Texas school, big football school, big track and field school. And I remember this coach coming into one of my classes to talk to the other athletes, and looking at me and going, "Stand up." And I stood up and she said, "You meet me on the track at 3:00." And I was so scared.

Amena Brown:

So I just went out there. And y'all, first of all, I'm a terrible athlete. Maybe in another lifetime. Maybe had my matriculation in school gone differently, maybe I would've made a good athlete. But I'm really not good at that. But the coach had asked me to come out there, so I did. And those of you that have children, or that remember when you were a teenager, sometimes when you get home from school your parents are like, "How was school today?" And you kind of, "Bop, bop, bop, bop. School. School. School. Class. Class. Saw friends. Saw friends." You're kind of too cool for school to be talking to your parents, giving them lots of details.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

So I'm assuming that I must've said to my mom, "Yeah, and then this lady came in and she said I should meet her at the track. So I guess I did." And I'm like, well go out there I guess and see how that happens. Anyways. I go to my room and do my homework, talk on the phone to my friends.

Amena Brown:

Y'all, I lie to y'all not. My mom showed up to the track. Do y'all understand me? She showed up to track practice. This isn't a meet. Okay. This isn't a meet. This isn't the state competition. My mom showed up to track practice with my sister, who has also been on this podcast. So if I'm 17, my sister's like six. So I'm assuming my mom probably went and picked my sister up from school, took her and brought her over. I get to practice, my mom is sitting in the bleachers with my sister. Y'all. "Mena. Go Mena."

Jeanne Brown:

I remember this. Oh, I was so excited.

Amena Brown:

"Yay. Yes. Mena, go girl. Yes. Do it, Mena." At the practice. That's how much my mom believed in us, as her children. She was like, I'm not waiting until you get to the Olympics. I don't care that this is your first practice. I'm going to cheer for you like you are winning the game.

Amena Brown:

And of course when you're a teenager, I just felt mortified. I felt so embarrassed. But now, as an adult, I'm like yo my mom really loved me like that. She really believed in me like that, that she was like, "I'm going to come out here and let you know." Even my mom, as a single mama, working as hard as you worked. There were some times that your work schedule, it wasn't going to allow for you to be able to be like, "I can step into your class in the middle of the day and bring everybody these cookies," or whatever. There were just some times your schedule wasn't going to allow for that, because you were providing for us by yourself.

Amena Brown:

But there were moments when you could be there like that. You would be there with the bells on, y'all. Okay. My mom is not playing these games, at all.

Jeanne Brown:

Oh yes. Oh yes. I was so excited for you. And I come from a long line of people that encourage one another. My mom, my grandma, whatever you needed, they would just be like, "You got it. You can do it." In their own way they encouraged you and they showed the love. So I think it just kind of ballooned or blossomed in me, when it came to you, and then of course when it came to your sister. When I found out something about athletics, I was like, "What? You're going to try out for the track team? Yes. I'm there. Let's go." I was ready.

Amena Brown:

Okay mom, let's dig into this poem now. Let's get into God Bless Mom, which is a poem that I wrote about my mom. So as usually in a Behind the Poetry episode, we're going to play a recording of the poem so that you can hear the poem in full. Know that my mom is not new to this poem. My mom has heard this poem many, many times. But now we're going to get a chance to talk through it so that she can share, with you, her real life experiences that I'm also writing about in the poem. So let's take a listen to God Bless Mom.

Amena Brown:

My mother read books to the swollen stomach that would become me. Read about what to expect when you're expecting, about disciples, apostles, prophets, sinners, and saints until her semi-colon broke, sending amniotic vowels and consonants to splitting apart. The time between my sentences grew less than five minutes apart. My paragraph had arrived and her margins stretched 10 centimeters wide so quickly that there would be no time for epidural or explanation. She must breathe, push, labor, count to 10, and then count 10 fingers and 10 toes. Trace her fingers on the lines of little eyes, little ears, little mouth, little nose.

Amena Brown:

And from the light of touch lamp on the nightstand she read me Golden books, sat me down in Peter's chair, kicked me rhymes from The Berenstain Bears. We put our hands together and said our prayers, that God would bless Teddy Ruxpin, Barbie and Ken, that God would bless Sydney, my one-eyed stuff animal koala bear best friend. That God would bless daddy and grandma, right before mom showed me Where the Wild Things Are.

Amena Brown:

See, she taught me to read, until I was reading her to sleep. Words given to me by the number five and letter A on Sesame Street. And oh the places I would go with Sam, Green Eggs and Ham in tow, searching for golden tickets in Roald Dahl's prose. I wanted to float on giant peaches with James.

Amena Brown:

Y'all remember this one?

Amena Brown:

Read Beverly Cleary, Ramona and Beezus, until I was Amena the brave. And I never really went through that stage of slipping my little girl feet into my mom's heels to play dress-up. I just wanted to read her library when I grew up, hoping I could be one of Mufaro's beautiful daughters, and maybe one day turn the pages of Tar Baby. See, she taught me to find my roots in the handshake of Alex Haley, taught me to love the stale paper scent of the library, to treasure books, cards, and stationary. And even today, years later, she joins me at kitchen table talking womanhood, over the scent of earl gray tea, taking in all the mystery, lifes, and Walter Mosley, trading Baldwin and Baraka, singing songs of Solomon, exchanging journals, wisdom, and pens.

Amena Brown:

And she reminds me with a skillful subtlety that sometimes this is where the sidewalk ends, that many storylines will come to an end, only for better ones to begin, that life is a page turner and you should write your own plot twists. That many will call themselves writers, but there is only one author who knows the end from the beginning, and sometimes the best and hardest thing you'll ever do in your life is trust him. Never forget, you pay close attention to your character. And remember that people are characters. They come and go, but never discount them. People are characters and your story won't happen without them. See, there is light in the attic, at the end of tunnels, and in her eyes. So tonight, before I shut off nightstand light, I pray that God will bless mom, and I'll read myself to sleep.

Amena Brown:

Not me and my mom both in here in our feelings. Hearing that poem, man. That poem is from my first live album, Live at Java Monkey. I can't believe how long ago that was now. So what made me want to write this poem is ... I think I was actually working on another poem and those beginning lines came to me about you, mom. I was supposed to be working on the other poem, but God Bless Mom came to me more quickly than whatever it was I was working on. And I was happy about the way it came to me, because of course, like many poets and many songwriters have dedicated pieces to their mothers. And I was like, "I love my mom. I would love to have a poem about my mom." But I didn't want it to be a generic mama poem. I didn't want it to be a poem that's for everybody's mom. I wanted it to be a poem that was very specific to you.

Amena Brown:

So then when that motif came in my mind about the words and the sentences and the books. And then that's always been a bonding thing between you and I, reading together when I was little and going to all these bookstores and greeting card stores growing up. That felt like oh yes, this is my mom's poem. This is very specifically about Jeanne Brown and what my experience was growing up with you.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

So I was really, really happy to see how the poem turned out. And since you're here with me, mom, I would love to talk to you about some of that real life story behind writing the poem. Because my experience of being your kid was you had a big wall unit. I don't know if it's because I was coming here to see you today, but I actually dreamed about that wall unit last night.

Jeanne Brown:

Oh wow.

Amena Brown:

You had a tall bamboo wall unit.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah. I remember it well.

Amena Brown:

And it just had books and books and books and books. And y'all, I remember as a kid going to that wall unit and picking out a book sometimes and opening it up. And I was just too young to understand what I was reading. You had Tar Baby on that shelf.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

You had The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker on your shelves.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes. Yes.

Amena Brown:

And so I remember pulling out those books sometimes, and I could tell from what little I could understand that it was beautiful. But I wasn't old enough and had not gone to school enough to really understand what I was reading. So that always ... that line in the poem is so true, that that's really what I wanted to, was get old enough that I could understand these beautiful books you had. So can you think of what made you love reading or what made you really become this connoisseur of books and stories?

Jeanne Brown:

I think it started when I was younger because my mom used to take us to the library. But when I was in school, they encouraged us to read so many books. And it's interesting because now I'm going back to that to where I'm trying to increase the number of books that I read per month, so that hopefully by the end of a year there's a large amount. Because, of course we didn't have the internet.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

We didn't have cell phones. So that didn't interfere with our reading time. So that's how it started for me. And I can remember in high school, especially in high school, there was just this big ... I was in a band when I was in high school. So by me being in the marching band, we read a lot. He told us a lot about music, our instructor did. But also, our English teacher. I loved English. And I took this literature course and that really catapulted me to really even ... The foundation that I had, it made me read even more. Because in the literature class we started reading Shakespeare, we started reading other authors. Some were people of color, some were not.

Jeanne Brown:

But because I just really loved reading, at that time it just became ... I don't know. It just became a thing, a bigger thing in my life, to the point where even my classmates, they would say, "You're just trying to be the teacher's pet." Because we would read Shakespeare and I would go home and read it again. So when we came to class, the teacher would ask questions and I would answer them, or I would give her my opinion. Or even if we read something, say for example if we read something about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or somebody like that, it just interested me more to want to read it more.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

So as a child, going to the library, and then being encouraged to read and seeing my mom read. And then, of course in church, of course they read the Bible. We went to Sunday school and we had a little booklet that we would read. But that was the foundation of just actually learning how to read. But in high school is when it really, really just really kicked off. To this day I still, I love Shakespeare. I just love it. And I love all of the authors that I've read, like the ones that you mentioned, Alice Walker. Some of those women that wrote. And there were some male ones too, Langston Hughes. I read Langston Hughes too.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

I read a lot of people of color, books that they wrote. And now I'm catching up on some of the newer books that I hadn't heard of, from some of the times that we have now. We have a lot of writers now that I'm catching up on some of the books that they've written. And it's just really, really been ... It's just amazing. The thing about reading, you could go to another world. You can go to another country. I may be in Georgia, but I can be in Africa with this person.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

And I'm reading about Nelson Mandela or some other person who went through something. I don't know, it's stimulating to me.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And so I would say that was the time when it really got to where I was just like, I'm reading all this stuff. And then I was in the military station in D.C. And D.C., at that time that I was there, was a mecca. And it still is, I just haven't lived there in a long time. But there was so many opportunities to actually meet these authors like Alex Haley. There was just so many authors that I met that it was just amazing. I had read their books when I was in high school. So when I went to something in D.C. and that person was there, it was just amazing to me.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. And I remember, because with Keda and I being almost 11 years apart ... So I was 10 when you were pregnant with Keda.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

And I remember it being really important to you that we would be reading, while you were pregnant. And you also told me that when you were pregnant with me you did the same thing. You said that you read to us, even when you were pregnant. What was it that made you, just that early on, and even as we were young children, even before we could read ourselves, why was it so important to you that we would also be exposed to good stories and exposed to good books?

Jeanne Brown:

For one thing, I learned that when a mother is pregnant with a child, I learned that even though the child is in utero, the child can hear. That's the reason why they recognize their parent's voices when they're actually born. But also that reading to them and hearing your voice is a stimulation. It stimulates their nerves. They're benefiting from that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

So when I learned that, that's what made me want to read to you even more. And also, music. Because the hearing of the fetus when they're inside their mama, their hearing is very acute. And that's the reason why a lot of times people will say, "Well I don't know how they seem like they recognize this person's voice." Well it's because they've been hearing this person's voice all this time.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

And whatever age ... I forget what the weeks were, but there's certain weeks where they're really hearing their surroundings. So then it became important to me, once I found that out, after you all were born it became important because I wanted you to be able to think and not just think in one realm. I wanted your mind to be expanded to where you knew things, whether it was history or if it was non-fiction or if it was fiction. That was important to me because I wanted you to be an independent thinker. And when I was in nursing school they taught us that. And I was thinking to myself, wow I grew up like this.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

Learning how to read something and interpret it. Reading the newspaper or reading just an article. So I wanted y'all to be able to, as little girls, I wanted y'all to be able to read a book, to know about what literature was out here, and to know what was being said in the books.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

If you could read it, you could do it if you needed to do a certain thing.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

And I also knew that it would enhance your ability. I learned that from reading ... I read a lot of psychology books when you were young too. And so I think that influenced me because this one psychologist was talking about how important that was, in year one to year five. And so that really got me going. That just really got me going. It was like that was just made for me. I would read books where the psychologist will say reading to children, it helps their development. So every year I would look up what words you were supposed to be saying. And I learned that you started talking at a young age.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

You started talking even though other people thought you were a quiet child. But you started talking at a very young age. So I attributed that to the fact that you were bright anyway, but also it helped you to formulate your words because I started reading to you. And then after a while, you started reading to me and I would fall asleep.

Amena Brown:

Right. That's true. That line in the poem, y'all, is very true because my mom being a nurse and depending on if she was just getting off from a shift and putting me to bed or if she was putting me to bed after ... depending on how her schedule was going. So as I got older, I do remember by the time I was five or six I would have some nights where I would start reading and you would go to sleep. But I would feel so accomplished, that I was getting to read to you until you went to sleep.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

And one thing I will say to y'all about my mom, when you brought up critical thinking, mom, that my sister and I talk about this all the time. And this is one of the things I really do love about you, mom. That even though, of course, as my sister and I both have grown up and become grown women, all three of us have different ways that we see the world, and our different opinions or thoughts on different things. And one thing about my mom is, my mom is open to having a conversation with you.

Amena Brown:

Now, you might be saying some things that she doesn't like. Or you might be saying some things that she doesn't agree with. And her jawline might be tight, tight, tight about what you're saying. But if it's this intellectual discourse, if there's an opportunity for you to be like, okay there's another perspective for me to learn or hear from, even if you walk away from the conversation and you're like, "I still do not agree with the fact that you said that." Even now, for us as adult women, having a relationship with you as our mom, that's one of the things that I love. Sometimes I look at Keda and I'll be like, "I know mom didn't like that, but you see how she stuck with us?"

Jeanne Brown:

Oh yeah. I stick with you. As they say, I ride with you, whatever. That's what family does. And it's just the same if you have a best friend. Even though your best friend might be saying something that you don't agree with, because you love them and because you know where they're coming from ... You may not understand everything. And you all just expand me, because there's some books that I hadn't heard of and I'll ask you all about this book or, "Have you heard of this?." Or, "What does this exactly mean?" I like the fact that you can explain it and that, as I keep an open mind, that I can become more of a person because I'm understanding.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

Because if we all agreed about everything, that would make us pretty much like clones or robots or whatever.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

So that's how we stimulate our brains, how we stimulate ourselves spiritually and emotionally. And so we just love it. I remember one time when we would all go to Barnes and Nobles. We could stay at Barnes and Nobles all day.

Amena Brown:

Matt and I were dating and he would ask me, "What's your family's holiday traditions?" And I was like, "Oh yeah, well on my mom's side of the family, whenever we spend Thanksgiving together with our extended family like mom, grandma, my aunts and uncles," I was like, "Yeah, we have Thanksgiving on Thursday and then on Black Friday we go to Barnes and Noble and just hang out there all day." And Matt looked at me like, say what now? He was like, "So what are y'all doing when you go in there?" And I was like, "Well sometimes grandma plays Scrabble and we just read magazines and read books." And I could just see Matt's eyes glazing over like, "And y'all feel like this is a good time? Okay. Okay, I got to read some books the day after Thanksgiving. Can't wait."

Jeanne Brown:

Oh yes. Yes.

Amena Brown:

But that is totally very true of our family, y'all. Really it's a family of readers and critical thinkers, lovers of words, which I love that. Okay, I want to switch gears, mom, and let's talk about tea for a little bit, because in this poem I have that line there which is still ... If people were to ask me when I close my eyes and think of my mom's house, what do I think of? And I'm like that scene that I'm describing in the book where I'm sitting at the kitchen table with you, wherever your kitchen table was in San Antonio, once you moved here, the different places you've lived since you've lived here. It's always this moment of sitting there at the table drinking tea with you, just talking about life. And Earl Grey tea in particular is the tea that whenever I smell the scent of that tea, I always think of you because that's the first tea I remember drinking with you. That and English breakfast were two teas you loved.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

So do you know what brought on your love for tea? I know you're also a lover of coffee too.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

But you drank tea with us too. So what brought about your love for tea?

Jeanne Brown:

Well I love Earl Grey. I think the Earl Grey came in because at some point in my life I had started reading ... Well there's different schools of thought. I started reading about how bad coffee was for you. But then I started reading about it's good to drink coffee. And so when I started reading up on that, then I started trying to learn about different teas that you could drink. I was a novice at the time. I didn't know a lot. So I started with that one because I had heard that that one was a real good one to drink in the morning. So that's probably what led me to trying that one first, when I first heard about it. Then later on I found out about how the different teas have different flavors. You can buy teas that have flavors. And it's not necessarily caffeine. But I like Earl Grey ... Well, I like Earl Grey because it does have caffeine in it.

Amena Brown:

Yeah it does.

Jeanne Brown:

I'm a be honest. I'm just going to go ahead and be honest, okay.

Amena Brown:

It's a good caffeinated tea. I ain't going to lie about it.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah, its a good caffeinated. And it's just something about the aroma of it when you're drinking it.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

Even before you drink it. It's kind of like coffee, in a way, don't you think? Because you could go into Starbucks or some familiar coffee shop, and even if you don't drink coffee, just the smell of the coffee does something to you.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

Because your body is going to respond to it. Either it smells good or it may smell like burnt coffee if it's not the right coffee shop. But that tea is just so therapeutic. So then this ties back to the reading.

Amena Brown:

Okay.

Jeanne Brown:

So then I started reading about the healing properties of tea.

Amena Brown:

Oh.

Jeanne Brown:

So after I tried the Earl Grey and the English tea that you mentioned, the breakfast tea, then I started finding out there's different teas that can help you, as far as when you're trying to heal up. That's the reason why when people would get a cold I would remember somebody saying, "Would you like some hot tea?" And then they would serve it to you with honey, because honey is very therapeutic also.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

And so I just feel like that just tied me into it. And then I have a friend, my best friend, Naima, I call her a tea guru. And she was trying to tell me how to get off caffeine, which I still don't know that that's a good thing to do.

Amena Brown:

Help us. Help. It's hard.

Jeanne Brown:

But I understand. So she helped show me some other teas, like a lot of the African teas. Some of the African teas you can buy, like the rooibos tea have no caffeine. Some have some caffeine. And when we went to Africa that time, I got a chance to drink some actual African tea, in Africa.

Amena Brown:

Oh yeah. That's amazing.

Jeanne Brown:

So that's how I got started with the tea. And then once I read about it, that it is good for you and it has some healing properties, I was sold.

Amena Brown:

That's how I know I'm my mom's daughter, because after Matt and I moved into the house we live in now, I had all this tea and I was trying to figure out how do I store it. So you know how when you move into a house ... my mom moved into her house a couple years ago too. So when you're moving into your house, you're always researching different things people do, how they store different things. And I saw somebody had a tea drawer in their house, instead of the cabinets. Because I couldn't figure out with the cabinets we had. So y'all, I have the largest tea drawer I've ever had in my whole life. But it works out so great, because between both of our houses we both know there's enough tea.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

When mom comes over, she knows I have different teas I'm trying out. And I'll come to her house and she'll have a tea I've never heard before, so I can try that out. So that is one of my favorite memories with you.

Amena Brown:

I wanted to circle back too, to the Alex Haley line in this poem, because I don't know that I've often shared this story. But when we were in D.C., mom is true to what she's saying that I just have such great childhood memories of us growing up in the DMV. Shout out to those of you that are in the DMV right now. We were living in Silver Spring, Maryland. And you worked in D.C., worked at two big hospitals there. In our time living there you worked at what was then Walter Reed, which was a very big medical center at the time. And you also worked at George Washington University hospital, which was another big medical center to have worked at there.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

But at the time, I don't know if this still happens in D.C. or not, but back then y'all ... this would've been late 80s, early 90s. There was an event called Black Family Day that was a big old festival on the National Mall. And there would be vendors there selling jewelry and clothing and purses and bags. There'd be performances. And famous black people would come and they would have different tents set up. And some of them were authors. I remember we met Esther Rolle, who starred in many things. But she was most well known to me from having starred in Good Times, as well as having starred in A Raisin in the Sun.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's right.

Amena Brown:

So you would be able to line up, with your family, and actually physically shake hands with this famous black person that came to give of their time. I was really, and still am, very fascinated with Roots and Alex Haley. My mom is diehard. Like when Alex Haley had written the autobiography of Malcolm X, when he and Malcolm X had worked on that together, when the movie came out I was a preteen. Yeah, I was preteen, probably junior high student. Older than preteen. A junior high student when the movie came out. And y'all, not my mom telling me that morning that I wasn't going to school and I need to read this autobiography. She handed me the Malcolm X autobiography by Alex Haley. And she was like, "You read this until I get home. And when I get home, we going to the movie."

Amena Brown:

So this same Alex Haley, before we moved to Texas ... I must've been, mom, I had to be eight or nine years old.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah. I think so.

Amena Brown:

Because it was before Keda was born.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

And we stood in line. It was a long line because, of course, Alex Haley means a lot to the Black community, and especially at that time.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

Roots the miniseries having been out. Roots having been a New York Times best seller and everything. And so we stood in line. You stood in there with me until we could meet Alex Haley in person. And I shook his hand. I think at that time you had told him I wanted to be a writer and everything. Just even having that moment as an eight year old. In this poem, y'all, when I saw the hand shake of Alex Haley, I literally meant my mom stood in line with me to help me meet him. That was such a wonderful memory.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes. You were little. I think you might've been about eight or nine.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

It was amazing to me to get to meet him. We met Esther Rolle, like you mentioned. And we met the young actor that played ... at that time he was very young, that played Theo.

Amena Brown:

Oh, Malcolm-Jamal Warner. That's right.

Jeanne Brown:

We met him. He was amazing.

Amena Brown:

That's right.

Jeanne Brown:

But meeting Alex Haley, that was just ... And of course it was a once in a lifetime event. I never got a chance to meet him after that, and not before that. So the Black Family Reunion was just amazing. You got a chance to meet people that were from Africa, that came home from Africa back to D.C. to experience that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

It was just so communal. Everyone was just friendly and wanted to meet your child, if you had a child with you. And I had you with me when we got a chance to meet Alex Haley. And he was just so personable.

Amena Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

I speak about it now and I think to myself, wow that was an opportunity.

Amena Brown:

It was amazing.

Jeanne Brown:

And I'm sure they have other events like that. But during that time, everybody was just there. We knew what we were there for.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And we knew we were going to get a chance to meet these celebrities. But it was just amazing that they wanted to meet us.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

Because when you went up to shake his hand and talk to him, I remember he talked to you just like he might've been your uncle.

Amena Brown:

He did. He did. Because he wanted to know what did you want to be when you grow up. So I think either you had said it or I had told him that I wanted to be a writer, because I had felt that way very young, just from being a reader though. It was being a reader that made me go, whoever gets to write words and put their words in this book, I want to do that.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

So I'm sure that either you said that or I did. And he talked and basically said, "You can do that. You can do anything you want to do."

Jeanne Brown:

Sure did.

Amena Brown:

And there's so many things, for those of you that are parents or are aunties, uncles here, have different mentees, have children in your life in any way. There's so many ways you can speak into the life of a child. And you don't know how those words, those good words ... We hear so many stories where ... and so many of us have experienced such negative words being spoken over us as children. But you can do a good thing when you can speak those good words into a child. I was just soaking up everything he said like a sponge. And of course, I'm eight years old. I have no way of knowing that one day I'm going to become this full-time writer, author, poet. I could never have guessed that I would actually get to have a career that I dreamed of as a little girl. But that totally influenced me to feel well this is a real thing. I'm talking to him and I wasn't even old enough to have read Roots. But I had held the book in my hand.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

Because I think we had at least one copy at home or in the library, whatever.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah we did.

Amena Brown:

So those moments are so powerful and so important. I also talked in this about journaling.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

About how just that is also connected to my memory with you. I talked in this poem about the journals and the pens and those different things. And you used to say to me ... and you said this to Keda as well. You would say that we should always have a place where we could be unedited.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

And you would say your journal's a good place to have that, because that's a place that you write for yourself. You're not writing for anybody else to read it. No one has to be the judge of that. You should have some place where you get to put your words. And that encouraged me to feel like my thoughts and feelings were important. Whether or not I chose to share them in a public manner didn't matter in that moment. It mattered, me writing that. And I've passed that on to so many young women, because it's such a powerful message that you gave to us.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes it is. It is, it's important. And I'm glad that that influenced you that way. I just knew that it was something that was valuable. For example, I went through a time in my life where I just wrote a word down. I couldn't even put a sentence to the word. And then I would just start looking up the words and say why is this word coming to me and what does it mean. And so I would journal just about that word. That would be the word of the day for me.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Jeanne Brown:

I went through a period of time where I would go ... say I went to the post office. And I would just be like, none of these people in here even know me. I could literally be invisible. Unless I just happened to run into somebody I knew.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

So that day ... my word for that day was invisible. So I went home and I started journaling my thoughts about the word invisible, or what it means for a person when they feel invisible. And I think that helped me. As far as growing up in the south, it helped me to be able to recognize people and to recognize that this is a person.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

This is a person here that you're talking to. So try to think about how you would want to be treated. Or even if you don't know what the person is going through, try not to treat the person like they're invisible.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

So just things like that, that may come to you. And you might get a poem while you're writing in your journal.

Amena Brown:

Right. That's true.

Jeanne Brown:

You used to say it might just be one line at first.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

And so I'm glad that that influenced you that way. And I just think, now that I talk to different people, great people, actors, writers, they talk about journaling. I just love the fact that that's being brought up. I just wish that I knew it was a thing that other people were doing. I would've probably been a part of the community.

Amena Brown:

Right. Okay, so let me ask you these final two questions about the poem. Normally, mom, I close the Behind the Poetry episodes ... And y'all, my mom knows this because she is an avid listener of this podcast, even when I be on here cussing.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

That's why I go ahead and let her know on the recording, so she can prepare herself. But she knows this. I close the Behind the Poetry episodes, normally I talk about what it was like performing the poem for the first time and how I feel about the poem now. But I'm going to turn those two questions to you. And maybe you don't remember the first time, because I know you've heard this poem now countless, countless times.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

But in the early first few times you heard this poem, how did you feel hearing the poem for the first time?

Jeanne Brown:

I just felt so overwhelmingly happy. It just made me just so happy, because the way you put ... At the beginning, when you mentioned about the semi-colon, that's just so ingenious. Who would've thought that a child of mine would be able to come up with this, even though I knew you were gifted with your writing. But I was just so happy. I was just on cloud nine the first time that I can remember hearing it. I was just on cloud nine. I was just so proud and just so happy that you actually formulated a poem about mom, and the mom that it was featuring was about me.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And the things that you remembered in the poem is some things that I just never even thought it impacted. Moms and, like you said, aunties and cousins and mentors, we do different things and we're not even realizing how it's impacting the person. But it is impacting them.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Jeanne Brown:

And hopefully it's in a good way. But when I realized from that poem that you had actually been paying attention to some things in life I said, "Wow. Wow, God." I was like, wow. And then you were obedient, because you could have got the poem and just left it in your journal.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Jeanne Brown:

You could have decided you were only going to perform it for us personally, when we were together, say on Mother's Day or other times. So the fact that you shared it with the world ... I'm still overwhelmed when I hear it. I love it.

Amena Brown:

I can't remember exactly the first time that I did the poem, mom. But I kind of feel like I did it several times without you being in the audience. And then by the time ... I do feel like I remember one of the first couple of times I was doing that in my poetry set and you were in the audience, and feeling the little choked up feelings. Because it was always wonderful and emotional to do the poem, even when you weren't there, because it was this very fun and nostalgic poem that other people would hear their own mom or Ramona and Beezus and some of those things. People would be like, "Oh man, I remember that show. I remember those books."

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

And so it was always very well received by the audience. But I feel like you were traveling with me or something.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

And I was like, "Oh, y'all, I'm about to do this poem and my mom's here." So it was very emotional to see you there in the audience as I'm talking about you, and then other people knowing you were in the audience so they're all looking at you while I'm doing the poem. That was just a really ... it was a really beautiful moment because I'm not a poet that writes a whole lot of poems to people. I only have a handful of poems like that. I've written one to you. I've written one to Keda. There's very few poems like that, that I also would perform that way. So it as really beautiful.

Amena Brown:

And y'all, of course mom has traveled with me many times now.

Jeanne Brown:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

And that poem, especially when I would be doing a lot of women's events, I would always include that poem in my set. And so even all the times you hear it, she would always tell me, "I never get tired of it."

Jeanne Brown:

Never. And that's true, I never get tired of it. It will make you cry, depending on what you're going through. Even though you wrote it for me, with me in mind, other people, I'm sure, it was emotional impact on them too, depending on where they are in their life at that time.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. So last question, mom. I wanted to know, now how do you feel about that poem now that you've heard this poem countless times? We've had a chance to talk through it. When you think about that was almost 15 years ago when I was first writing that poem. Yeah. Yeah. That was almost 15 years ago, mom. So now, having heard the poem, and us having grown to what I love is this wonderful place in my relationship with you. And I'm sure many of you listening will understand this part that I'm saying. But you have a certain time that you're growing up and your parents are your parents.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

Your parents are your teachers. You're assuming there's no life other than when you're my mom and when you're my teacher or whatever.

Jeanne Brown:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

You never see your teacher at the club or something like that.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

If you run into your teacher at the grocery store you're like, "Hmm, you go to the grocery store? You eat meals? You do things other than grade papers?" So I feel like when you're a kid, parents and teachers can have very one dimensional ways that you think of them. And then as you get older, you then become able to see your parents more fully. For me, I'm able to look at my mom and be like well my mom's my mom, but my mom is also a nurse who also had a career. She's been in a career that she loves. And my mom fell in love many times in her life and danced on the dance floor. You just have a more rounded version of your parent. And I have enjoyed this season of time with you where, you're still my mom, but also I really like you as a person.

Jeanne Brown:

And I like you.

Amena Brown:

We can get in a car and go to Target and have a good time. We can go across the world and have a good time.

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

And I really love that for us. And I love that for me, because it gives me an opportunity to get to know you as my mom, the woman. And now you can tell me a few stories that you couldn't tell me when I was 10.

Jeanne Brown:

Right.

Amena Brown:

But now you're like, "Well you're grown too, so let me tell you what really happened, now that I can speak on it."

Jeanne Brown:

Exactly.

Amena Brown:

So I would just love to hear, as we're closing the episode, from you, mom, how you feel now having heard this poem over these years, and what you think about that, and any other closing thoughts you want to tell us on your birthday episode.

Jeanne Brown:

Oh, my birthday episode. I just love how you put the poem together. And I just love how it reaches me and it reaches other people. Whenever I've been traveling with you and you did the poem, other people would always come up to me afterward and say, "Wow, how did you do this?" I was like, "I have no formula. I just encouraged her to do what she was good at and what she loved. And she did it." So I just love that poem and I'm glad that you still have it in your library of poems to perform, and that we got a chance to talk about it.

Jeanne Brown:

And when you talk about the books, the different books that I had, because now I'm going back through my library of the books. You know, okay these books I have to keep. This is a new one that I heard about through Amena. So I have to keep her book over here to make sure that I go back to her book. And then some of the books I'm downloading. I got to get back to the poetry. You and I, that'll be a conversation that we'll have to have. I got to find out some of the poets that I don't know about, that may have books that I may want to listen to some of their poetry or read some of their poetry.

Jeanne Brown:

But I just love it. I just think it's a good way to have your relationship. And by me having daughters, it gave me an opportunity to raise y'all. But now I get an opportunity to actually ... it's a mother/daughter relationship, but we have a friendship too.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeanne Brown:

And I like the fact that you brought up about we might not always agree with everything, but our family is the type of family, we're very outspoken. So we're easy to agree to disagree. But tomorrow when you talk to us, that's not even an issue. We get it out of our system by talking it over.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. That's true.

Jeanne Brown:

Closing, I love the fact that I can call you and I can say, "I got some tea to share with you today." And you'll answer me back with an emoji and I know we're going to have a good conversation, whether it's five minutes or 15 minutes.

Amena Brown:

Come on tea emoji. Now I get to enjoy double the tea, mom.

Jeanne Brown:

Double the tea. Yes.

Amena Brown:

See how we did that?

Jeanne Brown:

Yes.

Amena Brown:

That worked out. Mom, thank you so much for being willing to spend some of your birthday recording this today. I really appreciate it. And I have loved having you on the podcast to do this Behind the Poetry. This was very special. So thank you for coming into the living room. We appreciate you.

Jeanne Brown:

Well thank you, and I'm glad to be in the HER living room. I love it. I can't wait to see another episode, other than my episode I'm going to listen to, but of course other episodes. And I've gone back and listened to some previous episodes. So it's wonderful, so keep up the good work. This was just a treat for me.

Amena Brown:

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 iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 56

Amena Brown:

That time I met India.Arie. That time I went on a really bad date. That time I was directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got mono on Thanksgiving. That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour that time I... Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week's episode of Her With Amena, and this week I'm going to try a new thing. Okay? So I'm going to try it and then if y'all dig it, I want you to write to me on social media or comment when I post about this episode, and tell me if you dig it. Because if you dig it, then this is a thing that I'm going to come back and try every so often. So I want to do an episode that is on the theme of, "That time I..." And each time I do one of these episodes, it will be a very special story that I will tell you based upon whatever the theme is of the episode. Okay? So today we are talking about that time I got mono on Thanksgiving. It is Thanksgiving week as this episode releases, we are the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and I thought it would be a great time just to share with you all in our HER living room about some of the Thanksgiving mistakes that I have made in the past.

Amena Brown:

I come from a divorced family, okay? So what this means is I have had the experience as an adult of having to decide which parent I spend which holiday with. So when I was post-high school, I think once I got into college in my early twenties, I decided that Thanksgiving would be the holiday that I would spend with my dad and my dad's side of the family, and then Christmas was the holiday that I would spend with my mom and her side of the family. And this arrangement worked out super great because my dad and his side of the family live in Nebraska, the flights were always cheap around Thanksgiving if I would just go and stay the whole week, and my twenties were a stressful time, so it was actually a relief to just get to my dad and stepmother's house and have nothing to do but just eat food and hang out. I would take the week off from whatever job I happened to be working at the time, okay?

Amena Brown:

The star of the Thanksgiving meal at my dad's house was my stepmother's cornbread dressing. Okay, and let me just stop and make a little note right here. There's a difference between dressing and stuffing, okay? Some of you are like, "I already know, I already know," but in case you don't already know. Let me just tell you: stuffing is when there's like a bread, crumb or situation that gets put inside of the bird, right? And baked, cooked, whatever alongside with the bird. Dressing is something that on the plate accompanies the bird, but is cooked separately from the bird, and my stepmother's cornbread dressing. It was everything. It was everything you could want. It's cornbread, sort of all crumbed up together with celery, and onions, and lots of Sage, and chicken or Turkey broth, and you stir all that up together. You bake it in like a lasagna pan and then it comes out, you cut it by the square. So basically you put this square of cornbread dressing next to your turkey. You go ahead and just drizzle some gravy on it. If you've got it. I remember there was one Thanksgiving that I think my brother and I almost made ourselves sick eating so much of the cornbread dressing; it's everything.

Amena Brown:

So as I got older, I learned how to also make the cornbread dressing, and I also spent my twenties learning a lot of the Southern food staples for my grandmother. So my grandmother taught me how to make macaroni and cheese, and I'll let me just stop and take a note here, I mean, we're talking about like baked four or five cheese, macaroni and cheese, okay? We're not talking about the one in the box, that's not a thing in my life in general, but it's definitely not a thing on Thanksgiving. Okay. My grandma also taught me how to make collard greens. So I was sort of picking up a lot of these amazing, soul food, Southern food type of dishes, okay?

Amena Brown:

So then I turned 30 and I fall in love with the man who is now my husband, but was then my boyfriend, and that first Thanksgiving that we had when we were dating... Because we dated a year and then we got married. So we only had one Thanksgiving that we were boyfriend and girlfriend, right? That Thanksgiving, I remember that my then-boyfriend's parents, they were going out of town for the holiday. His younger brother was staying in town because he was working through the holiday, and so as we are talking every day on the phone for hours, he tells me, "Yeah, I decided to stay for the holiday, my brother's here." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, we need to have Thanksgiving together." And he was like, "Okay."

Amena Brown:

So then I go to my mom, and my grandma, and my sister, because they live here in Atlanta, and we just decided all of us were going to have Thanksgiving together and that I was going to host. Now at this time I was actually living with a friend of mine in her house, and she was gone for the holidays. So she agreed to let me host my first Thanksgiving at her house while she was out of town. So I commenced to just cooking for what felt like days on end. I probably was cooking for at least a couple of days because I cooked all of the sides. I cooked candy yams, I cooked collard greens, mac and cheese, and I cooked the cornbread dressing. And my mom was like, "I will take care of the turkey."

Amena Brown:

So I just remember maybe the Tuesday and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, are just a blur to me between grocery shopping and cooking everything. And of course I'm feeling the extra nerves because my new boyfriend is going to come over and spend Thanksgiving with my family and his brother, because I hadn't spent a lot of time with his brother, and my sister. It was just all of the dynamics, okay? So I make the food and the food turns out amazing y'all, this is basically the beginning of me becoming the Thanksgiving host, right? Because I knew how to make all the sides and everything. I was so ready for it.

Amena Brown:

Now here's where things present a problem, okay? After we all sort of enter that Thanksgiving malaise, where like you've already had your one or two plates. And then you're just laying around, sitting around, watching football, if it's still on or watching a movie by this point, got to be late into the evening, and I'm not going to lie, I was starting to feel a little out of it. But I was like, "It's probably reasonable for me to feel out of it; I just hosted my first Thanksgiving. I spent the last two days cooking. I'm probably just tired." So everyone leaves and goes home, and y'all, I wake up the next morning and my throat feels... Like y'all seen the movie Knives Out? My throat feels like Knives In, okay? My throat feels like there are just daggers, and needles, and knives just scratching my throat away. My throat felt like it was on fire in the worst way, which I was assuming must've been strep, but it just unnerved me that I just went to bed and woke up, and that was the first feeling I had when I woke up as being in terrible pain.

Amena Brown:

So I called my boyfriend and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, my throat hurts so bad. I don't know what's wrong." And he's like, "Okay, I'm coming to get you." So he comes to get me. I'm calling my mom, who's a nurse telling her we're on our way to the Urgent Care. Y'all go into the urgent care and what do they tell me? It's not strep, they tell me it's mono, okay? And if you're not familiar with mono, mono is something that you typically get when you're a teenager. The colloquial term for mono is, "The kissing disease." Okay? So somehow I have managed to skip getting mono as a teenager because I never got mono in high school or college, but somehow at 30 years old, have decided to get mono for the first time after hosting my first Thanksgiving.

Amena Brown:

And now, it's just taking away some of the cool from me in my relationship to my new boyfriend. Now, thankfully Matt and I, we were friends for two years before we started dating each other, so we had already just been hanging out. I've been hanging out with him when I just was wearing sweat pants and a raggedy T-shirt, and so there were a lot of parts of our relationship where we already had gotten rid of a lot of those pretenses, but now you're dating, you're trying to be cool. And you want that person to think of you in a certain way. And here I am in the car with my boyfriend in the parking deck of Walmart, where I am picking up the meds that I have to take for mono.

Amena Brown:

And the doctor was like, "You need to go home and quarantine yourself for at least two weeks." So I had to just go home after that. We picked up some books and some magazines, and I just had to stay at my house for two weeks and try to feel better. It took me weeks to feel like my normal self, and that is that time that I got mono on Thanksgiving.

Amena Brown:

What does this mean for you? If you are cooking this week, because I'm going to tell you, I've never gotten mono again, but I have had some other Thanksgivings where I basically cooked myself sick. And I don't know if I just get so excited about cooking that I'm just in the kitchen and forgetting to drink water and eat food and just do all the things you need to be healthy as a normal person, I don't know. I don't know what that's about with me, but it has happened to me a few other times where I have totally cooked for days for a holiday and then promptly got sick either the day of that holiday or the day after. Okay, so look, if you are the person who is cooking this week, take some breaks, okay? Drink some water, get some rest. Don't get mono is the main point. Delegate tasks, let some other people make the dishes. And I know it's hard, I know it's hard because you want to feel like you can trust people to make food. And sometimes they make it and you can't trust them with it. I know that's hard, okay? But you got to protect yourself. Just don't get mono, okay? And to be honest, these days don't get COVID okay?

Amena Brown:

Look, this is a pandemic Thanksgiving, many of us, we're not going to be able to gather with our families, our friends as usual, so this is also a great opportunity. Make some new traditions. Maybe you find some new dishes to cook? Maybe if you're used to cooking for a larger crowd and you're not this year, you can figure out how you can make some dishes for one, or for two? Make your own little Thanksgiving meal for whatever the size of your household is. And listen, there is no shame in not cooking at all for Thanksgiving; you can support your local restaurants by getting takeout. If you're not into cooking. You have a lot of options this year regarding receiving the Thanksgiving food. But whatever you do not, I repeat, do not get mono.

Amena Brown:

This week of Thanksgiving seems like a great time for me to share with you all the things I am thankful for. Number one, I am thankful for pandemic bralessness. Pandemic has brought us a lot of terrible things. One thing that the time of quarantining and even still, even though we're not necessarily quarantining right now like we were when the pandemic first really hit the States, I'm basically still working from home, and home most of the time. And I'm going to tell you something, my shoulders are very thankful for that. Do y'all know that I don't even remember the last time I had on a bra with underwire. I mean, who cares about underwire now? You know? Quarantining has brought me and my breasts the ability to just hang out, and me and my breasts, we are thankful for that.

Amena Brown:

Also I am thankful for designer masks. And when I say designer, I don't mean these very expensive designers, but I am just thankful for all of the different creators, fashion brands, clothing lines, especially these independent clothing lines and fashion brands that have been making these amazing masks, like Etsy is a whole place to go and just find all sorts of different prints that the masks are made in, all sorts of different messages the masks have. Some of them have the masks that tie in the back and some of them hook around your ears, and some of them have one strap that goes around your head, and one strap that goes around the back of your neck. And look, it's important to wear masks. And also it's important to me to be cute. And I want to thank and give a special shout out to all of the people who are helping me do both; helping me be safe, helping me keep other people safe and helping me look cute while doing it.

Amena Brown:

I also want to say that I am thankful for leggings and sweatpants and just in regular life, I would have been thankful for them because I wore leggings and sweatpants all the time before, but now, I mean, that is really my attire every single day. And leggings and sweatpants, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you for your cotton. I want to thank you for some of you having a five or 10% spandex. I just want to thank you for your various designs. Your ways that you have held me in, you have held me down, you have just held me, leggings and sweatpants, and I thank you for that. I don't really know how I'm ever going to return to jeans life. Jeans just isn't really it for me. And it's weird to think about that because one of my friends and I were talking about how, when we worked in corporate America to get the chance to wear jeans was very exciting. I remember my first corporate job where we had casual Friday. I was super excited about those jeans, but now I work during the week, but I dress like it's Saturday every day, and I don't have any regrets about that. So leggings, sweatpants, I think you.

Amena Brown:

Another thing I'm thankful for is this season of The Bachelorette, and let's just talk about this a little while. Let's just talk about this. I'm not a person who normally tunes into The Bachelorette. The only other season that I watched was Rachel Lindsey's season, and just to be utterly honest, I was watching because I was like, "Wow, there's a Black woman on here." The rest of the seasons of The Bachelorette, I just can't take it. But this season, there was so much trash that happened on this season right here, and I'm going to try not to do any spoilers if you haven't watched it yet, but this season of The Bachelorette has really brought me a lot of joy, because some elements of trash TV, they just bring me joy.

Amena Brown:

And just seeing this season slowly unravel in these very fascinating ways. The Bachelorette is really carrying me through, y'all. And I don't even normally watch it, but I was glad to watch this season. And so I thank both bachelorettes and I think all of the suitors and the roses. Wow, that entertainment, what a blessing to us to have that season be like this, this year. And if you think about it, 2020 itself has just been a year of a lot of strangeness, a lot of oddities. And so this season of The Bachelorette was actually to me, the perfect season of The Bachelorette to have happen right here in the middle of 2020. So I am thankful for that.

Amena Brown:

Also, another thing I'm thankful for is I'm thankful for Lovecraft Country fascinating me and scaring me into nightmares. And let me just tell y'all, I do not do scary stuff. I don't do well with horror movies, I don't watch horror films, I'm a person who will watch a movie, and if it gets too scary or anything like that, too supernatural, I will have nightmares and I will not be able to go to sleep, but I could not not watch Lovecraft Country. And if you're hearing me say this and you're like, "I don't know what this is," Lovecraft country is a sci-fi, I guess, I guess I would say it could fall in the category of sci-fi, fantasy, horror show, and it's just wonderful. Shout out to Misha Green, who is the creator of Lovecraft Country. And I was like, "I cannot not watch the show," the conversations on Twitter, and even among my friends that were watching, there are some episodes that we had to really break down and discuss.

Amena Brown:

So I am thankful for Lovecraft Country, even though, because it is still scary to me, and Lovecraft Country was scary in an interesting way because it definitely had some horror sci-fi elements to it that were scary for that reason. But then because of the way the story is written, and because the story is centered around these Black characters, navigating racist America, even though it is not set in our present day, it's very timely to watch. And a lot of the racism that you're watching in the show is also racism that is happening in real life, so it had this element of sort of the double horror in the sense of in part, it's scary because of these monsters that are showing up in the show, but it's also real life scary because some of the elements in the show are scary things that happen in real life.

Amena Brown:

And I also want to confess to y'all, I was talking to a friend of mine about horror films, and I told her, as I was trying to say the word, "Horror" her, I realized, I don't know if it's my Southern upbringing, but for me, when I say it, "Horror," it doesn't have two syllables. I'm really saying, "Whore." I don't know where the extra, "O-R" is. I don't know where it's at, okay? But as far as I'm concerned, it's a horror movie. It's a show with horror in it, but that's one syllable and that's all I have. I just discovered that's all I have, and I don't think that I can teach my mouth another way to say that word. So if anybody wants to take me to Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is H-O-R-R, and y'all can go searching for that other, "O-R". I don't know. I don't know where it's at.

Amena Brown:

Another thing I'm thankful for is Twitter. And I know, I know y'all, I know; Twitter can be a strange place, okay? I have some moments where I'm like, "I love it here." And then I have some moments where I'm like, "Oh no, I hate it here," but I am thankful for Twitter this year because Twitter was one of the ways that I was able to find out if anybody in Atlanta was actually finding Lysol in this store. It is also how I was able to find out how voting and polling locations were going, where I live, because it made it easy to search on there and see what people were talking about. And for TV shows like The Bachelorette, like Lovecraft Country, like Married at First Sight to have just, almost a group of some of your friends and other people you may not really know, but they're cool, and they're funny, and to get to talk about that stuff on Twitter has been amazing. And also there've been some times that Twitter has just been a dumpster fire, bless us all, but I am thankful for the times that Twitter was amazing, so Twitter, you are also on my things I'm thankful for list.

Amena Brown:

And I'm also thankful for Thanksgiving memories. I know that this Thanksgiving is just going to be really different for me because I normally take the whole week off, I go to the store Sunday or Monday, I start cooking already on Monday because there are certain dishes that take preparation and whatever. It's like a Cook-a-Palooza for me Thanksgiving, I love it so much. And this year is going to be different, there won't be the large crowd of our friends and family at our house, and there won't be as much preparation to do because we'll just be making food for a much smaller crowd of people. But I was thinking about one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories, and I think it's good to be able to grieve the things that being in a pandemic causes us to lose, I think that's important. And I also think it's important to think about some of the memories we had before, and let some of those bring us joy.

Amena Brown:

And I remember when we would go to Thanksgiving at my grandma's house. My grandma had a tradition, and I know there are other Black families that had this same tradition where you would go around, and someone would say the grace, and then everyone would say a scripture after that, like a Bible verse. And there was one Bible verse that only has two words, "Jesus wept." And I remember as a kid, even before I got old enough to where they would have been expecting me to know a Bible verse to say after the Thanksgiving prayer, I would always look around and sort of see this grimace on the faces of the other adults when grandpa said, "Jesus wept" because that forced everyone else to have to think of some other Bible verse that they could remember. And, "Jesus wept" was the only one they had in their arsenal, right?

Amena Brown:

So I want to also be thankful for Thanksgiving memories, be thankful for my grandpa stealing the thunder of every adult at most Thanksgivings by saying, "Jesus wept." And then the rest of the people had to think, do they know another scripture verse? Can they say this other one? Will they have to go and stare at a Bible without everyone looking, and then come back and say one? And listen, my grandma's house was one of those houses where everyone had to say one, it wasn't just up to the people that wanted to, and they would stand there and wait for you until you found something that you could remember. So thank you to Thanksgiving memories.

Amena Brown:

And last, but definitely not least, I want to say thank you to all of you. We are weeks, weeks, weeks into the relaunch of HER with Amena Brown, and it has been so wonderful to me to connect with you all, to know that you all are listening, whether you are listening in your earbuds, or your headphones, or you're in your car or doing your chores around the house, whatever it is that brings you to listen to this podcast. I just wanted to say thank you because I am so, so thankful for each of you. The hardest part for me about recording a podcast is that I can't see any of you that I'm talking to you and you're hearing me, and you might be talking back to me wherever you are, but we can't see each other. I hope a time will come when the pandemic is over, And when we're able to get back to having some events and stuff where I can get a chance to actually meet some of you in person to see you set up some, HER living rooms live in some cities so that we can be together. But I am thankful for you. I hope that you have found some inspiration in the stories and the laughter that is here on this podcast, and this podcast would not be able to continue on if it weren't for you. So I am also thankful for you, listeners.

Amena Brown:

Tell me what you're thankful for. Give me some comments on social media. You can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @amenabee, I'd love to hear from you. Tell me what you're thankful for. Tell me what it is important to you right now. Maybe what are some of your Thanksgiving memories? I would love to hear that. Thanks for listening.

Amena Brown:

For this episode's Give Her a Crown, I want to give a crown Toni Tipton-Martin, author of Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. Part of Thanksgiving for me is celebrating the soul food traditions that were passed down and kept in our family. Toni is doing such great work, preserving the archive and history of Black culture and food in America.

Amena Brown:

I also want to give a crown to native American poet Joy Harjo, one of my favorite poets and our current United States Poet Laureate. Each year in the before times, before the pandemic, my husband and I would host our family and friends in our home for Thanksgiving. And before we prayed over the meal, we would always take a moment to honor the Indigenous people who originally lived on the land, where we now live. We live in Atlanta, Georgia, and the land here was originally inhabited by the Muskogee Creek people. After the Muskogee Creek were forced off their land by colonizers, many of their tribe who survived now live in Oklahoma. Joy Harjo is from Oklahoma, and she is Muskogee Creek. To close today's episode, I want to read to you all an excerpt of one of Joy's poems, Remember, from her book, She Had Some Horses.

Amena Brown:

"Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, to talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind, remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe. And this universe is you. Remember all is in motion. Is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance languages that life is. Remember.

Amena Brown:

For more information about Joy Harjo and Toni Tipton-Martin's books, you can get this info and much more in the show notes at amenabrown.com/herwithamena, And you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @amenabee.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 55

Amena Brown:

Hey, y'all. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. And if you didn't know, it I'm Amena Brown, which works out super conveniently for the title of this podcast. Today, we are talking about treat yo self. Hmm.

Amena Brown:

In season four, episode four of Parks & Recreation, Tom and Donna introduced one of my favorite concepts, Treat Yo Self Day. Hmm. I hope I have some Parks & Rec fans listening. I've learned quite a few things the last few years of life, and then some particular things about what it means to treat myself during the pandemic and all of the additional stressors that so many of us are walking through right now. So I thought it would be cool to dive into some of this for today's episode. I wanted to share with you all a few things that I use to treat myself.

Amena Brown:

I'm working with a coach right now, and we were talking about just some tough things that I've been navigating these past few months. And one of the things that came up in our conversation is, when you're going through something that's really difficult, to think about what you can do to bring yourself comfort during that time. And I thought that was a really powerful thing to sort of put my brain around as she and I were talking about it.

Amena Brown:

We talked in the session about what are the things that I do that bring me comfort? And who are the people that bring me comfort? So I throw that powerful question out to you all today as we talk about treat yourself. And for us, we're not talking about just treat yo self day, we're talking about how to have a rhythm of treating yourself, which I think can be such a fun thing and a wonderful thing, too.

Amena Brown:

So that's what kind of got me thinking about that, because that was part of my homework assignment that I wanted to give to myself. Coming out of the session with her, I wanted to think about what are the things that bring me comfort? What are the ways I can treat my myself? So the first thing I thought about is certain smell-good things bring me comfort. That is one of my first go-tos for how I treat myself. This applies to candles, shower gel, body sprays, bathroom sprays, and essential oil, particularly when I'm using essential oil and a diffuser, right?

Amena Brown:

Smell is really important to me. There's something about certain fragrances that just having a really nice shower gel that I love the smell of like that feeling in the shower or having a bath bomb that I love and being able to smell peach or mango or vanilla or sandalwood, mahogany, there are just so many fragrances like that that bring me comfort, but also the different fragrances sort of have different roles for me. I think I'm a very compartmentalized thinker in this regard.

Amena Brown:

So when it comes to like relaxation, I love lavender. That's my first go-to. When I traveled on the road a lot, I would like a little travel essential oil diffuser, and I would have my like 100% lavender essential oil. And sometimes I would mix it with peppermint or sometimes I would mix it with eucalyptus. And even having that in the room when I traveled, first of all, made it feel a little more like home, but also just helps make my mind realize it's time to wind down for the day, it's time to let go of whatever the stressors were of the day.

Amena Brown:

I love vanilla as well. And I love mango. I love rose as a scent, a lot more than I thought I would. I've never been a person that traditionally loved roses. My husband knows me so well and knows about me that when he gets me flowers, he typically never gets me roses for the most part, because he knows if I'm going to get flowers, I love a bouquet of all these different flowers. I love sunflowers. I haven't been a person that loved rose or that rose fragrance.

Amena Brown:

And of course it depends what it is, right? That sometimes you're smelling sort of this imitation of rose fragrance. But I got into this shower gel that I love that smells like rose. And then it had a matching lotion to it. And I think, actually, it's a mixture of rose and something sweet, the way it smells. So I love rose. That's one of my favorite things.

Amena Brown:

And I have scents for all sorts of different things. I have the scents I use to relax. I have certain scents I like for when I want to focus on work. I have certain scents I like for date night or sexy time. Mm-hmm. Because the living room is a place for grown people. The HER living room is a place for grown people. Mm-hmm.

Amena Brown:

And I have certain sense I like for what I need to clean up or a certain scents I like to smell that makes the house feel like, oh yes, it's clean, tight? I'm sure many of you, when I said that you, have like certain sense that you remember maybe in your parents' house growing up or your grandparents or wherever you grew up. Some of my friends tell me it's Fabuloso. That is the scent that they're like, yes, things are clean when I smell that or a Pine-Sol.

Amena Brown:

For me, it's always something that's between something that smells lemonade and that smells like bleach. That feels like, the house is clean. Okay. Yes. We love to see that. The fact that I love things that smell good and that things that smell a certain way bring me comfort. This leads me to one of my major Treat Yo Self purchases, candles. Okay. I want to discuss... I want to just sit in a moment and talk about candles for a second.

Amena Brown:

So, first of all, in my pre-pandemic life, I had a mostly road life. Which meant the rhythm that my husband and I had, for the most part, we spent many years traveling together. And then there was a period of time where we were starting to get gigs that where both of us were booked. So I might be booked in this place and he might be booked over here, right? But either way, we were still sort of having these season time that were very event-based. It was either based on travel or based on even like they were local events. There were still events, event schedule you had to stick to, right?

Amena Brown:

Versus our home life when we had time at home, time in our offices, just to get to experience what home is like. And I think that brought out a couple of things. I think sometimes that meant that we didn't really have the time to make our home feel like home, right? And then I think there were also times that there were certain things we really gravitated towards doing because we so enjoyed the time that we got to spend at home. Because even all of the creature comforts that you can think about doing when you're traveling, it's like it's still not going to be home. There's nothing that's going to be like home, right?

Amena Brown:

And there would be some periods of time, especially once Matt and I got to the point where we were doing our business together, we were in our business together, but we were doing work with separate clients. We were doing separate events that we weren't doing together. There would be these different moments of rise and fall in the schedule where sometimes it would get really busy for him, but it would totally slow down for me. Right? And typically, in pre-pandemic times that would happen in the summer and around the holiday time between Thanksgiving and kind of Christmas time.

Amena Brown:

For the summer, for me, things would kind of slow down. A lot of the events that I was doing weren't really going in the summer. I was talking at a lot of colleges back then. I was doing a lot of conference work. And conference work kind of follows the school schedule a bit. So it was sort of like by the time the summer came, my whole schedule would be cleared. And that would be the time that my husband would be really busy working, having different events he was doing, different clients he worked with.

Amena Brown:

So I would always joke with him that that was my time to sort of have a short period of time to act like I was a stay-at-home wife. And I want to talk about what my fantasies about being a stay-at-home wife really entailed. Because it's one thing.... Some of my friends who are stay-at-home wives or partners who are stay-at-home parents will tell me this. It's a very different experience when you are the partner in the relationship that stays home when either the other person is rich or both of y'all are rich.

Amena Brown:

And all of my dreams of being a stay-at-home wife were based on being rich. My friends who were stay-at-home wives, partners, parents, right? They would say, yeah, this job is challenging period, but it's a especially challenging when I'm staying home and now we on a tight budget. That's different. What you do with your spare time is different. But my grandiose dreams, whenever we hear the term, which no one says anymore and I don't see them anymore, but I remember when I was growing up, rich people were always like eating bond bonds. Or when other people would make a reference to someone rich, they would be like, they don't do anything, but sit in their house and eat bon-bons.

Amena Brown:

And now I'm like, what is a bon-bon? And how can I get one? I'm going to find out about that and report back to y'all. So I would joke with my husband like, wow, I don't have any events, any work to do. I'm going to have two months where I'm going to live my like dream stay-at-home wife life. Now, of course, my husband and I are not rich. Okay? So I could not do the things that were really in my dreams to do like buy new curtains, just start getting all the flooring redone in the house for no reason, but that my mood has changed. Get things painted in the house. Decide this whole furniture set is nothing. And I need a new set of furniture.

Amena Brown:

Those were kind of like my dreams of what I wanted to do when I thought I was going to be a rich stay-at-home wife. And I will tell y'all something. I was 31 when I married my husband. I have to have a separate episode, probably telling y'all a little bit more about my dating history. But I didn't start dating as an adult until I was probably 25, 26 was my first time really going on dates as a grown woman. Separate from high school and college, right?

Amena Brown:

And I remember at the time that I was between 25 and 27, I would go out to all these different events and mingle things in the city. And a lot of the men who approached me and wanted to go on dates with me were anywhere from seven to 10 years my senior. So if we just used the 10 years as an example, if I'm 26 at the time, there were men who were 36 wanting to go out on dates with me.

Amena Brown:

And a couple of them were rich or wealthier, well-to-do men. Some of them were not rich, but they were well-off in the sense that they were well established in their careers, they made good money. And I learned from these dates, which never made it to relationships, they would just be these 1, 2, 3 dates and they'd be like, no, no, thank you. I learned from these dates the type of woman that they were looking for. And a lot of them were looking for a woman that was going to be willing to become a well-to-do or rich stay-at-home wife.

Amena Brown:

They were looking for someone that was willing to give up her career entirely, who was willing to have children if possible, who was willing to manage their household, make sure there was food ready them to eat when they got home. And then you are pretty much going to spend the rest of your time decorating the house, going to get your manicure, pedicure, facials, whatever stuff you do like that. And that was going to be your life.

Amena Brown:

And in my mid-twenties, I contemplated it, y'all okay. I contemplated it. Because I was like, I'm working this job I don't like. I'm meeting these in men who are willing to sort of buy me out of this life of having to be concerned with this money, maybe this is a thing that I could really do. And then I discovered, oh my gosh, no, I can't do this.

Amena Brown:

One of the guys I dated, it's clear that he never made it to a relationship with me because I still cannot remember his name. But I remember that I called him Mr. Lavender Pants among my friends, because one of our dates, he came to the date wearing lavender pants. And it wasn't just that they were lavender, and then that threw me off for some reason, it was also that they were starched to the high heavens, y'all. They were starched like he didn't starch them himself. He sent them to the cleaners and was heavy starched. Like if he took those pants off, which he never did that I saw him. Okay? But if he took those pants off, those pants would've stood up on their own, is how heavy they were starched. Plus he had on sandals and black church socks under the sandals. I digress.

Amena Brown:

So Mr. Lavender Pants, I don't even remember how we met, y'all. I just remember we went on a couple of dates and he was starting to ask me like, so you work at blah, blah, blah company. How's that going? Do you see yourself like climbing the ladder there? And I was like, no, I definitely don't see myself climbing the ladder there. And he was like, oh, okay. He was like, do you see yourself wanting to have children? I was like, yeah. He was like, oh, okay.

Amena Brown:

And then as we're continuing to talk, I'm realizing like, oh, do you cook? I'm realizing, oh, I thought we were on a date. I'm kind of on like an interview situation with you. And he was basically like I'm... This happened to me more than once during this season of life in particular, dating men of this age. This happened more than once where it just came down to like, if this dating turns into a relationship and then we decide we're going to get married, spend the rest of our lives together, would you give up your job and do these things for me?

Amena Brown:

Which basically meant, if we have kids, you taking care of the kids, you taking care of the household, you're managing all those things. When I get home, I want there to be some food on the table and then I want there to be sex. That's basically the agreement. And I was like, well, I don't know that I would mind that life, but I do intend on being a writer, though. So there would be sometimes that I'm sure I'd be writing a book or working on an article or an essay or something. And things would always get kind of tricky when you got to that part.

Amena Brown:

So, I guess I got close, potentially, to my dream of being what I imagined is a rich stay-at-home wife, but there was some agreements there, y'all, that I just couldn't keep up. I just couldn't keep up with that. I was like, I think what you're saying you want is I think you want something that's like a combination of like a nanny, a made, a cook, a house manager that also has sex with you somehow. And that is not what I want for my future.

Amena Brown:

So I rescinded that life. However, whenever these times come where my work slows down and my husband's work is so much busier, my main thing that I afford to treat myself to do as a, I don't know where I am. It's not a rich stay-at-home wife as a stay-at-home wife that has a few dollars. For two months. It's normally two months I have this experience, and then it's like, boom, I got to get back to work. The schedule has picked up now. I treat myself two seasonal candles and hand soap.

Amena Brown:

I know. That ain't the same as picking out new curtains. Okay? I know it's not the same, but this is what I've decided I can commit to with my work schedule, plus my husband's work schedule and on a realistic number of money that we can actually spend on things. So I decided I was going to become this person. I'm like, I'm just going to have like fall hand soaps, fall candles, then I'm going to have the sort of holiday winteresque, hand soaps candles. Okay? Then we're going to have a springtime situation. Then we're going to have summer. Then We're going to go back again to fall and I'm just going to switch these out.

Amena Brown:

And at first I did this because I love hosting, my husband and I both love hosting people at our home. So I like for people to go into your bathroom and they've got a nice candle there, a nice bathroom spray, a nice hand soap to represent the season. Then the pandemic happened and hardly no one was coming over here. So I was like, well, I treat myself to nice hand soaps and nice candles because I like it. And it's our house. And we should enjoy our home as well.

Amena Brown:

Okay. Now, let's discuss. My main place for purchasing these items, I'm not going to lie, is TJ Maxx. And I do have times that I order from like a small business that specializes in making candles. I do have times that I do that. But for the most part, that doesn't happen often because when I typically am in need of candles, it's like a spur of the moment decision that I've made.

Amena Brown:

So yes, I started out hoping I would become a person that would switch out the hand soaps and the candles seasonally, but the pandemic has really brought me to a place where emotions have caused me to go to TJ Maxx and get candle wasted. First of all, there's not that much damage I can do, going to get candle wasted. That's different than getting purse wasted or shoe wasted. The amount of money that I'm going to spend is not going to be like something that is really terrible to have to explain on the bills. When my husband's looking at me like, why is it thousands of dollars on candle?

Amena Brown:

It's not going to be thousands of dollars on candles. It's going to be however much I've decided I'm going to be wasted with, but it's still going to be a reasonable amount of money. Right? Okay. I have gotten candle wasted because something really sad happened. And I was like, I need some candles in here. I need the comfort of the way the light of candles is so warm and cozy. I need the comfort of the scent of these candles. Okay.

Amena Brown:

I have gone to get candle wasted because something really great happened. And I was like, I want to celebrate myself by. When Christmas time comes having a candle that smells like a Christmas tree, even if I don't actually have a Christmas tree. Okay? Okay? So I have a lot of reasons that have led me to getting candle waste and it's been a wonderful experience.

Amena Brown:

But let me tell, y'all. One of the last times I went to get candle wasted it was earlier this year. Something very, very sad had happened and I was like, you know what? Mm-mm (negative). I'm over life right now. I'm going... I went to Starbucks. I treated myself to a little... Oh, I think because it was earlier in the year, it was before springtime had come in. So some of the holiday drinks were still around. And that's my main time that Starbucks is my thing.

Amena Brown:

I really don't go to Starbucks often because in the area we live, we have so many amazing mom and pop shop coffee places like local coffee. So normally I'm doing that, but during the holiday time, which we are now in and approaching, there's some Starbucks drinks that I do need to have. So I treat myself to Starbucks. And unfortunately for me, there is a TJ Maxx like three doors down from this Starbucks.

Amena Brown:

So I go over there. I am sad to the hilt. I'm just filling my little cart up with all the candles I can think to buy at the moment. And there is a gentleman who is standing near me, also looking at the candles. He is humming, humming, humming, just a wonderful, sweet tune that, for some reason, is in his mind that day. And I'm kind of looking at the candles, putting a couple in my cart. And then he's humming. And it kind of like I'm looking at him out of my peripheral vision.

Amena Brown:

So kind of looks to me like he's humming. I see him picking up candles and it looks like he's doing a dance. So I actually turn to look at him. And y'all, I realized that he's shoplifting. He's doing this sort of, it looks very like this choreographed routine where he's humming and he's picking up the candles. And he has this way that he's sort of dropping them down into his book bag. And then he'll grab another one with the other hand and drop it down into his book bag.

Amena Brown:

So at this time, I realize a couple of things. Number one, I realize I'm not going to be the one to blow the whistle on this man shoplifting these candles. I don't know why he's shoplifting them. Maybe they're for a boo. Maybe he just likes to have his candles to smell nice in wherever he lives and this is the method he's chosen to receive these candles. I don't know.

Amena Brown:

Either way, I was like I'm not going to be telling on you today, but also I can't be standing here while you do this. So then I have to take my cart and do a pretend shop where I like go all the way around TJ Maxx for a while and go looking at some other stuff when we know good and well, I came up in there because I wanted to get these candles.

Amena Brown:

And in a way, it was kind of like a little chuckle that I got to myself on what was a very sad day that day. Because I was like, wow, I'm having a terrible day that has led me to these candles. And whatever's going on in this man's life that has brought him to the place where he is shoplifting these candles, wow. Hmm. So I came back, of course hoping that he hadn't taken all the good ones, and he was gone. Finished my candle situation. And I was like, hmm, you have so many things happen to you when you go to get candle wasted.

Amena Brown:

And let me tell you, I've learned now that candles can also be a part of spiritual practice, right? So I keep a candle or two in my office. I like to light a candle sometimes when I'm working. If I'm working on something that I feel nervous about, I like to have a lavender candle in my office. Right now, my favorite candle is actually a pumpkin spice latte candle. And it smells so amazing. And I cannot really have coffee like that very much. So to be able to have a candle where I can have that coffee smell every day has been very nice.

Amena Brown:

I have candles that I light for when I need to wind down. I got this idea from one of my best friends, Adrian. She told me that sometimes she'll have a candle, that when the day is over, she'll light that candle and just the scent and the action of lighting it is her way of telling herself like, work is over, the day is done, we're winding down now.

Amena Brown:

I like to have candles in each bathroom. I realize that those of you that are listening that have little ones or little kids in your house, this is not an option for you. So I do understand that. But since there are no kids here and it's just my husband and I, and for the most part, a lot of our friends don't have little, little ones that would be reaching up, putting a hand on a candle, we keep candles in the bathrooms.

Amena Brown:

And I probably need to have a separate conversation with you about why it's important to me to keep candles in the bathroom. Let me do a side note right here. I actually just did a rant with my assistant, Leigh, about my need for candles to be in the bathroom. Okay. Listen, everybody has to go to the bathroom. And sometimes people are at your house and they have to go number two. Okay?

Amena Brown:

My husband and I have hosted many food holidays. Sometimes up to like 20 people have been in our house at one time. I know that some of those people going to have to go ahead and do a serious bathroom situation. Here's what I don't want for you. I don't want you to have trepidation. It's a bathroom. That's what you're supposed to go in there and do. I go ahead and light a candle for you. Number one, because I'm thinking of you, but also because the candle is going to help your situation if you end up having a surprise boo boo or something come up with you. Or maybe it wasn't a surprise and you knew it was happening. You had to rush in there and go ahead and handle that.

Amena Brown:

I provide you with a candle in the bathroom. I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking about me. I'm thinking about who has to go in the bathroom after you. I'm thinking how you don't want to be embarrassed by however it is left there after you had to do your business. I not only provide you with a candle, I provide you with bathroom spray, too. I can't tell you how many other people's bathrooms I've been in that have neither of these things. I understand for the people who, for safety reasons, cannot keep candles in their bathrooms. At least have a spray, people. Okay?

Amena Brown:

And let me speak a word to the event planners in this situation. Okay? I told you all that. I used to go and travel all of the country, doing all types of events. And nine times outta 10, I think this might be particular to churches for some reason, because a lot of times when you're... No, I was about to say this is just particular churches, but it's not because sometimes this happens to you in a venue. A lot of places where people are performing, where speakers are speaking, there'll be a big green room. And guess what? The green room only has what? One bathroom.

Amena Brown:

Do you know how many artists or speakers need to get that number two out of the way before they go on stage? Y'all couldn't bring a candle in here? Y'all couldn't bring some spray? Do you know I have had to go before I go on stage? And it's like you want to go ahead and take care of that. You don't want to be out here on stage. You're already having so many things to think about when you're performing. You're paying attention to the audience. You're remembering your material. You're gauging from the crowd how things are going. You can't also hold your pelvis together to make sure you don't go to the bathroom. No. You need to clear that situation. Bladder and bowels need to be cleared out before you go on stage. And those are just the rules. I don't make the rules. Those are the rules. Okay?

Amena Brown:

Let me tell you about a time that I had to go real bad in the green room. And the bathroom is like near a bunch of people. Okay? So you're already worried, can the people hear me when I'm in here? You hoping the music is loud enough, whatever. I had to go and look around. Y'all, there's no spray in the room, except there is a spray, there's a bottle of lavender scented spray starch. That was all I had to help me and the others who have to come to the bathroom after me. Right? I shook that spray starch and sprayed it. But what? It's spray starch. It literally just ssh right to the floor. It's not aerosol. It's for your shirts. It's for Mr. Lavender Pants who wants to put creases in his jeans for some reason. Okay? It is starch, but that's what I had. So that's what I used.

Amena Brown:

So when you were in my home, if you were ever to be in my actual living room and you're a guest over here, there's a can and there's bathroom spray. And if, for some reason, a candle isn't safe, so we've got little kids in the house, there's bathroom spray. You feel me? Because the people need it. Okay? If you have an office, put spray in the bathroom. Put it there. It makes the world better for everyone. Okay. That's my rant.

Amena Brown:

Also, I use candles as a way to be an indication of the rooms I have finished cleaning up when I'm cleaning the house. So it's like once it's like, here, we have vacuumed here, we have dusted. I light a candle in that. I go to the next room. A lot of times my husband and I are doing this together. So he's doing the floors and I'm doing the countertops in the kitchen, light a candle. I like having candles as this way of knowing when something's about to begin, when something's about to end, as a comfort for your guests in their time of need.

Amena Brown:

Let me speak another word about candles. One of my friends said something to me that I thought was so powerful. And I don't know if she said it because she grew up doing this in her own religious traditions that she grew up with, but I told her something that had happened in my life. That was rough. It was rough, rough, rough, rough. I told it to her. And she said, you know what? She said I'm going to light a candle for you. And she explained to me that, for her, when she would light candles, that that was prayer to her. That she would have, sometimes, specific candles in the house that she would light. And just the action of lighting that candle was this way of saying in her soul that she's thinking of this person, of the things that they're going through, she's remember them. That for her, that was an action of prayer, which I thought was so powerful.

Amena Brown:

And I think about that a lot. This is a season of time as you were listening to this in the fall, this is a season of time for me where I really, really love to have candles in the house during this season. And it's a good way to hold space to remember... I didn't know how much comfort it would bring me to have someone say they would light a candle for me. And I have thought many times I also want to be loving and gentle enough to myself to light a candle for myself sometimes, too.

Amena Brown:

And even the action of lighting a candle for someone, sometimes people are going through such hard things that you don't have the words to say to them. If you are a person who prays, you may not even have the words to pray, but the action of lighting that candle can be this expression of what's in your heart even if you don't have the words to say. Speaking of words to say, apparently I have a lot of words to say about candles. So, Yankee Candle, sponsor me.

Amena Brown:

Other things I do that are treat yourself moments for me, I enjoy a pasta night where I just cook pasta for one. My husband works most weekends. So I have a lot of like Friday and Saturday nights to myself. And sometimes I hang out with a girlfriend like really the concept of the HER living room. Really does happen for me with my girlfriend. So sometimes I'll have a girlfriend come over and we'll piece together some little snacks or meals or whatever between her house and mine. Or sometimes we'll order food or make food.

Amena Brown:

But I've been enjoyed some Friday nights, especially because Friday, I don't know how y'all feel, but sometimes Fridays, I feel like that is not a day I want to have any social activities on Friday night. I just want to be at home. I just want to chill, especially if it's been a long week. And part of the pasta night is me also learning to enjoy my own company that I also like to hang out with myself. I have lots of people I love to hang out with, too. But that I can also love to hang out with me.

Amena Brown:

So sometimes I'll take whatever leftover veggies we have for the week and make pasta like that. Sometimes I'll find a red a recipe that I really want to try and I might run by the store and just pick up those ingredients. And just making enough pasta. It's not the same cooking that I might do during the week that I'm trying to do meal prep and make enough to last for a few days or several days. It's just something to eat for that night. And that a wonderful way that I love to treat myself.

Amena Brown:

Also, I will say wash day has become a big opportunity for me to treat myself. And those of you that are listening that have natural hair, all the Black women listening that have natural hair know what I mean about wash day. Wash day is this tradition in the natural hair community. And for me, at first, when I first went natural, wash day was just like a lot of learning because I hadn't dealt with my natural hair in 20 years? So it was mostly like educational and experimenting. But now that I've been natural over 10 years, I have an idea of the products my hair likes, of the routine that's good for my hair.

Amena Brown:

And shout out to my hair stylist, Brandy Sims. She has helped me so much to continue with healthy regimens for my hair. But I used to bemoan wash day, taking a long time. And now I just like to actually plan a day to wash my hair where I can take my time, where I'm not rushing for it to be done for anything, and just luxuriating in my hair products, in the way they smell, in the way they feel on my hair, in getting a chance to investigate how my is doing. Is it thinning out at some places that I didn't notice? Is it growing? Just all of that taking time to tend to myself.

Amena Brown:

And I think for me, and I know for a lot of Black women who have natural hair, there's still a lot of stigma that we have to undo about what we were to hot about our hair, that our hair is too much, that our hair needs to be tamed, or controlled, or whatever those things are. And just letting my hair be itself. And when I'm taking my time with my hair, that's also taking time with me and that I deserve that whenever possible.

Amena Brown:

I wanted to close by talking about this because I know, a lot of times when we say terms like self-care, which I talked about this a little bit in my conversation with Bethaney B. Wilkinson recently, when we talk about self-care, sometimes what I've been talking about is what comes up, right? We are talking about ways we pamper ourselves, maybe. And that's not all that self-care is. And I hope to have some other episodes to talk to you all more about that.

Amena Brown:

But I want to talk about ways you can treat yourself that don't involve money or big-ticket items, because treating ourselves, even self-care is not only for the rich, the wealthy, the people who have this blah, blah, blah money. Treating yourself does not have to involve money. And there were many times in my life where I couldn't afford to get candle wasted. There are times now that there are things I would love to treat myself to financially that I may not be able to, but there are ways to still luxuriate even without having to doll out all this money.

Amena Brown:

So here's some ways you can treat yourself that may not involve spending lots money, or may not involve these big-ticket items. You can treat yourself to a nap. There are some days that you just need a nap. And when you can, you should treat yourself to that. Naps are free, but they can also be really great if you are having trouble sleeping at night, if you are going through some things in your health or hormonally, for some of us, treat yourself to a nap.

Amena Brown:

You can also treat yourself to moments of silence or moments of quiet. I know for some of you listening, you may have a very bustling household. You may have children in your household. You may have a household that's full of lots of pets, lots of family members. For some of my friends that have households like that, they say the bathroom is their one place, or their car, when they have like that one part of their commute that it's just them in the car, you can treat yourself to a moment of silence, a moment of quiet.

Amena Brown:

You can treat yourself to a dance party. If you have an album that you love, you can play that album while you're by yourself and have an opportunity to just dance. Nobody's looking. You don't have to be worried about that. You can treat yourself to some music that you love. Some music that makes you feel good. You can treat yourself to a listening party. And this is so that my husband use to do when we were living in our old place that we have been able to do for many years and I hope to get back to it.

Amena Brown:

But we used to have a listening party at our house. And we would invite all of our friends that were working in artistic, creative, industry. We would invite them over. We would pick an album. We would play the album from beginning to end. And we would all just sit and listen to it. And people would bring their journals. They might bring a sketch pad or a canvas, and they might draw, or they might write, or they might just sit and listen. And then after we finish listening to the album, we would talk about what it meant to us, or maybe we'd share whatever we had decided to create if we had created something while we listened.

Amena Brown:

And this is something you can do with some people that you love. It's something that you can do just by yourself. Take yourself back to a time where we might have listened to an album all the way through, or take yourself through a playlist that you love and listen to that playlist. Have that teenage moment that many of us had where we really just had our headphones in and got to enjoy our music.

Amena Brown:

You can treat yourself to books from the library. The library is such a rich resource in our community. I hope that you're supporting your local library. It's such a great place. I definitely have had times in life where I cannot go to these books stores and buy more books. But I could go to the library. I did that as a child a lot. They have newspapers there, and books there. They have music and DVDs there. You can even check out eBooks from the library as well.

Amena Brown:

Those are things that you can have a chance to experience that are ways you can treat yourself that don't cost you anything. You can treat yourself to books you already have in your own library. And this is something where I really need to take my own advice here, because sometimes I'm kind of a book collector. I don't know if any of you are like this. And so there are some books that they come out and I'm just like, man, I want to have a copy of that in my library. And I buy it. And then years go by and I never actually read the book. And so just even returning to some of the books that you may have around that you haven't had the chance to read can be a wonderful way to treat yourself.

Amena Brown:

And my last tip of a way that you can treat yourself that doesn't have to cost you money, that doesn't have to be a big-ticket item is talking with someone who makes you laugh and leaves you feeling full and not drained. That's a beautiful way to treat yourself. I thought that was such a powerful question when my coach asked me, who are the people that bring you comfort? And people that bring me comfort are the people that I can wear whatever when I'm around them, that there's a lot of joy and honesty in our relationship.

Amena Brown:

So think about who that is. You probably had a name that came to your mind already when I said that. Call that person. If they can safely visit with you, if you can meet up somewhere or if they can come to your house, you go to their house, hang out in person. If you can't do that safely, try Zoom. If you're all Zoomed out, try talking on the phone or having some other app where you can communicate with them. Try to spend time with people that are not always there to drain you, to take from you. Think about the people that really leave you feeling refreshed, replenished. They leave you feeling filled up and refueled in the best way.

Amena Brown:

Those are some ways that you can treat yourself that don't have to cost you any money. Whatever happens, whatever you decide are your methods of treating yourself, you deserve it. So I hope this week, you are thinking about at least one way that you can treat yourself this week. Think about something that you can do for yourself, to celebrate yourself, to make yourself laugh. If it's something that you want to buy, buy it. If it's something that you can get without buying anything, then do that. But as our great innovators, Tom and Donna from Parks & Recreation, taught us, whatever you do this week, treat yo self. Thanks for listening.

Amena Brown:

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

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 54

Amena:

Hey everybody, welcome back this week to HER with Amena Brown. This week I'm bringing back an archived episode to our HER living room. In a recording from the before times, I talk with multi-disciplinary artist, Mikkoh, about the connections between art, activism, and wellness. Mikkoh shares how her journey as an immigrant influences the art she makes and how she uses her platform to elevate the art of Asian American artists. Check it out.

Amena:

Everybody let us welcome Mikkoh to the podcast. I just, I'm so used to being in front of an audience, Mikkoh. I'm just used to there being this like, "Woo!" So, I end up clapping. So, I'm going to do that for you.

Mikkoh:

I'll clap, I'll clap too.

Amena:

Oh, so we're clapping together. That's good. I like it. Mikkoh doesn't really know me, y'all. We have some mutual friends and she knows my sister. My sister is actually who first told me about you, Mikkoh. She was like, "Hey, you need to check out Bae Worldwide." Mikkoh's going to tell us more about that. She was like, "You need to check out Bae Worldwide, you need to check out Mikkoh." And I was like, "Word." So, I started following. We have all these mutual friends and I just think that she's amazing. So, I'm really glad that she's agreed to be on this podcast today.

Amena:

Mikkoh, let me tell you, I first saw you DJ at ... was it Super Low Key? No. I first saw you DJ at the Flip Side. The first Flip Side event that was at 529. I think my husband and I were ... We were at something else and were trying to hurry whatever that was along so that we could hurry up and get to the Flip Side. Because Jennifer Chung, who's our great friend, was going to be singing there. And John Song, who we knew as Jules from his artist name, was going to be performing and all these amazing people. We go to 529, first of all, it's packed. It's like wall to wall people. I'm here for everything. And Flip Side, for those of you that are not familiar with this event, is all of these amazing Asian American artists that have come together to just elevate each other's voices and art. I just really, the entire night, Mikkoh, just was standing there like in awe of everything. I was just soaking everything up. The music, the crowd, everything.

Amena:

And I'm married to a DJ, I'm married to DJ Opdiggy. And even really before DJ Opdiggy and I were married, I'm just a DJ snob, to be honest. I don't believe that anyone should waste their time with whack DJing. Because it's not necessary. It's like bad food. Bad food isn't necessary, it doesn't have to be like that. I don't see why I should waste my time on it. That's how I feel about DJing. So, I've walked out of some events. My husband will tell you, if the DJ gets just whack unnecessarily, I'm just like, "I'm going home." Because there's music for me to listen to on my phone or at my house. Why should I stand here and be uncomfortable? This doesn't make any sense. Watching you, I have watched you DJ more than once because I did watch you DJ at Super Low Key as well. You're freaking amazing, Mikkoh.

Mikkoh:

Oh my God.

Amena:

I mean, the DJ choices that you make. I love when a DJ is spinning and as an audience member you get surprised. You're like, "Oh, didn't know you were going to go there, but you did and I'm glad about it." That's what it's like watching you DJ.

Mikkoh:

Thank you.

Amena:

That's only one aspect, y'all, of the things that Mikkoh does. Thank you so much, Mikkoh, for joining me today.

Mikkoh:

Oh, thank you so much. I'm so honored that you asked me to be a part of this. I don't have many opportunities to I guess speak on my story or speak at all while ... I mean, occasionally while I'm DJing I'll get on the mic and hype the crowd up. But usually I don't. The body of work that I do, just different kinds of mediums, I don't usually speak. So, this is a first for me. I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for asking me.

Amena:

Mikkoh, obviously we know you DJ. There are other creative things that you are doing. What is in the Mikkoh repertoire? You are DJing, and what are the other creative things that you're doing?

Mikkoh:

Yeah. I would say, man, I'm just a really curious person. So, I like to get into a lot of things. A lot of things that I do have been self-taught. But I work with a team, a company called Poly Visuals and we do storytelling videos. We've done little mini docs, done some client work with corporate brands, music videos and stuff like that. What else do I do? Dabble in graphic design here and there. I think ultimately I just want to be a creative director and I think I have a lot of ideas in my head that I want to implement. Yeah.

Amena:

I love this. First of all, I love this and I'm just like this is amazing, just all of these talents. I'm like, what is it like? My husband's this kind of person where he DJs, which is kind of interesting thinking about this Mikkoh. Because my husband also DJs, but he has a visual eye also. Where he can dabble in graphic design and he'll dabble a bit in some video production too. And I'm just ... I just literally have a lot of words to say and write and I don't have anything else. If somebody's asking me for some other talents, I'm like, "Yeah, that's it. That's all I have."

Amena:

It's interesting to me to think, you're now the second person I know that DJs, but also does sort of visual art as well, which makes me wonder if there's some connection to how the brain has to work when you are sort of spinning records and doing mixes and things like this. And if there's a similar part of how the brain has to also think about how you can visually tell a story. Does it feel to you like something is the same in those processes? Or for your mind, are they completely different?

Mikkoh:

Well, I think there are a lot of similarities there. I feel like there is a single thread that kind of ties in a lot of art forms together. For me actually, I started when I was a child with visual arts. I actually painted and we did a lot of art classes, I used to go to the dark room, develop photos back in high school and whatnot. And then music has always been a part of my life. I am Korean American, so my very Asian parents have put me through a lot of musical instrumental training. But I never I guess imagined to actually pursue this in any way professionally. But I mean, a lot of these ideas and the way that my mind works is just all from me being locked in my room and trying out different things. I'm just a very curious person. I think I'm just naturally like that.

Mikkoh:

And if I'm curious, I'm the type of person to seek it out and try it. And I do kind of see a lot of similarities in these art forms. Especially in DJing, I mentioned that I do a lot of video production and I help brands tell their stories and whatnot. When it comes to DJing when I'm on a stage, I really like to kind of ... You know how I play, I play all different genres. I'm an open format DJ, so I try to kind of play everything that I like, which can be chaotic sometimes. But there is ... I feel like I'm weaving a story on stage. Play a little bit of similar stuff, and then sometimes I throw in I don't know, sometimes random, crowd reacts, so I'll keep going with that. Yeah, really it's like DJing has been a very ... I don't know, it's been a crazy journey for me because I'm not ... I've just always been a very quiet person since I was young. I never, ever dreamed of performing on stage for hundreds of people. I don't know if that answered the question, but ...

Amena:

No, that totally answered. You're touching on a question, or a type of question that I always ask each guest. I love to find out from each guest sort of an origin story. Because I think origin stories are so fascinating because if we sort of return to our younger selves, our younger selves are in so many ways telling us who we're going to become, even though you're not always picking up on how all the pieces are going to land. I was also a very shy and withdrawn child. It surprises me in so many ways that I became a person that performs on stage. Because I'm like, I just would rather have been in a corner reading a book or writing in my notebook or whatever.

Amena:

So, part of my origin story of what I think made me become a writer is just I loved reading, I was very nerdy growing up. All of that exposure to how words can be used well really influenced what I wanted to do with words when I became older. Did you have a moment that you can look back on now as a child that you knew, "Oh, I think I'm going to become an artist."? Or was that something that came to you much later in your life?

Mikkoh:

Oh, definitely much later. Man, I actually immigrated to America when I was really young, probably around three, four years old. I loved art and I kind of showed those signs of being an artist when I was really, really young. And my mom tried to cultivate that in me. But then when I started going to school, she realized I was also really good at school. And of course, being the [tiger 00:12:03] mom that she is, and being the immigrant mom that she is, she kind of pushed me in that direction. I love my mom and she has all the best intentions. But yeah, I was definitely pushed really hard in school. But I was kind of ... I challenged myself too, when I was a child. I took all the gifted AP courses, thought that I was going to go to med school. I went to Georgia Tech and studied engineering.

Mikkoh:

When I went to college, I actually dropped everything that I was doing art-wise. Because for me, as an immigrant, I guess I call myself a 1.5 generation. Because I'm not quite first generation immigrant, and I'm not quite second generation. But being Asian American, I couldn't even imagine pursuing anything in the creative arts. That was not even talked about at home. I didn't even bring it up to my parents because I didn't think it was a possibility. I mean, I naturally go into this engineering route. And then maybe about third year in, I was just really unhappy. I knew I didn't want to do this. I mean, I was in the lab doing Alzheimer's research and stuff, which was really cool. But I didn't feel ... I mean, it's really hard. And mad, mad respect to people in STEM fields. Because that's like taking years and years of research to become something that's really revolutionary in terms of science.

Mikkoh:

So, a lot of it is really ... It's small, minor steps to get there and years of research. It's a lot of ... I mean, to be honest, boring. I didn't feel like I was making an impact. I guess I'm kind of an impatient person. I didn't feel passionate anymore about it. At that time, I had joined this nonprofit just doing just for my resume, I was just fresh college kid trying to get some extracurricular activities on my resume. And it ended up becoming something that really changed my life. Because I know you know a little bit about collaboration. But for those who don't know, it is a nonprofit who is really trying to push diversity in mainstream media mostly focused on Asian Americans.

Mikkoh:

I just started out as a volunteer helping out at shows that the team would produce, and they would be showcasing Asian American talent around in Atlanta. This is just the Atlanta chapter, it actually started in LA, and there's several chapters all around North America. It was really cool because you get to see this network of Asian American artists, even from the LA side. They know all the big actors and musicians out there, people who I've seen growing up. Even, I mean, like people on YouTube, like Jennifer Chung, I grew up watching her on YouTube, since middle school, high school. So, when I met her I was such a fan girl. But it's crazy because we're really good friends now. But yeah, I mean, I ... Collaboration, it kind of showed me that hey, I can do this. Or, I have other talents where I can bring communities together and I can inspire people to keep pushing themselves. And I saw that through that. And especially the older staff members and stuff that really mentored me and showed me that you can do this.

Mikkoh:

I was getting close to all the Collaboration fam people and then somehow got connected with the Atlanta art scene here. A couple of my artist friends who I really liked and I loved their music, they're music producers and stuff like that who told me that I had great taste in music. So, I was like, "Oh my God, I might have great taste in music." They just kept pushing me. They were like, "I think you should try DJing." At that time, I was going to a lot of concerts and shows and I was like, "Yeah, man, I kind of want to try doing this." It was just inspiring to see people on stage doing it. So, I tried it out. It was super well-received because first of all, there's just not that many Asian American DJs in Atlanta. And then also Asian American female DJs. So, I kept going at it. People really liked what I was playing. And here I am now, almost four years later I've been DJing.

Amena:

Oh my gosh, Mikkoh. I can't even believe you just said four years. Because me seeing you live, I would not have even known that it had only been four years. That's ... Wow. And I told you, I'm a snob. I will walk out right now over some whack DJing. I just can't even stand it. Oh my gosh. That is just amazing. I love how Collaboration as an organization not only played this role in your development as an artist and even just in how you were going to navigate the world. But now you having an opportunity to work with them even more closely, I think that's so dope. Because I've been thinking about the idea of safe spaces. And that's one of the things that really struck me about going to Flip Side, where I first saw you. Because I think when we talk about diversity, and diversity is important. Also, it seems like diversity is going to be best done when the people of color, the marginalized voices, also have safe space among themselves as well.

Mikkoh:

For sure.

Amena:

That was one of the things that really struck me about being a Flip Side that night. It wasn't that I wasn't welcome to be there. I was totally welcome to be there. But I also understood that this is so beautiful and such a safe space for every Asian American artist that's in this room, and for every Asian American that's in this room, even the ones who are like, "Art's not really my thing. It's not my jam. But I'm here at a show watching people who have similar background to me or similar story to me, watching them share their art on stage uninhibited." It was so powerful for me just to be there sort of to bear witness to that. I think that is so important for all of us as artists, but in particular those of us who are people of color. That we are fighting to see ourselves and our stories represented in the mainstream while we are also cultivating this community among ourselves so that we can be seen and heard and honored in all the ways that our stories deserve. I really, really love that.

Amena:

You and I also share that we are both living here in Atlanta and it just sounds like Atlanta has played a big role just obviously in your family and in your development as an artist. For me, when I was first coming to Atlanta, I grew up a military kid, so I had moved around a lot. I got to Atlanta and I was like, "Oh my gosh, all these Black people are driving Benz's, this is crazy." Everything was amazing, just seeing all the various things that people who looked like me were doing here. So, I was sort of having an element of culture shock because I was coming here to go to Spelman College.

Amena:

And speaking of safe space, Spelman being one of two historically Black, historically female colleges, I got a chance to meet all these Black women from various parts of the world speaking various languages, coming from various religious backgrounds and upbringings. There was no monolith among us. I'm sure you experience this when you're doing work with Collaboration too. It's like everybody has some shared experiences, true. But when we all get in the room together it's like we all come from very different places, also had very different stories. So, that was good for me to see all the things a black woman could be, by meeting all these women. What was it like for you coming to the city, you were very young when you first got here. But what was that like as your entry into living in America? Did you experience this, as you got older, this culture shock of that? What was that experience like?

Mikkoh:

Yeah. Yeah, so my only memories of being a child are in Georgia, the state of Georgia. I grew up in Duluth, Georgia, which is mostly known as the K town over here.

Amena:

Word, word.

Mikkoh:

Although I did immigrate to America, I did feel that I was in this kind of ... Well, at that time there weren't as many Koreans, but there were still a ton of Koreans here. I still felt like I was in this bubble of this Asian community that looked out for each other. Many of the people immigrated to America, Korean people who immigrated to Georgia, all stayed in Duluth. I mostly grew up there, until I went to Atlanta when I went to Georgia Tech. And when I went to school, there was like oh my God, I feel like I'm actually experiencing Atlanta as it is and the city where I got to I guess diversify my friend group. Because I think that because I felt safe in my bubble of Asian American, I mostly hung out with Asian Americans. Especially the immigrant communities here in Georgia, for us, a lot of our gathering places were the Korean churches around here. That's kind of what my upbringing was like.

Mikkoh:

My mom is a missionary, she just got ordained as a pastor as well. That was my whole religious upbringing. So, I come to the city and I still felt a little bit like a small town girl. Being in Atlanta, it really kind of opened my eyes to, man, there is so much more out there than Duluth. It's been crazy because now I have actually mostly predominately non-Asian friends. But the thing is, I was the token Asian. I was the only Asian girl person in the building. And then when I started doing art and being kind of more of a figure in the city, I'm one of the very few Asian people that are doing it out here.

Mikkoh:

I think especially with the political climate and stuff the past few years, it really made me kind of rethink how I do events around the city and how I curate these kind of safe spaces. Because I had created Bae Worldwide fresh out of college, and that was for mostly female artists. And then I moved on from that because I was like oh my God, there are no Asian artists in the city. With the whole Black Lives Matter and these political movements coming through, it really made me kind of look inward into my own community. Because before, when I was first doing DJing and stuff, I never did anything with Jennifer and John. Because I knew they were, and I knew that they were artists as well. But I had never even imagined working with them on stuff.

Mikkoh:

When I was forced to look inward into my own community, I was like oh my goodness. I think it's so awesome that these little subspaces are kind of being created within different POC groups. Me and John started Super Low Key, and we are doing little popups for Asian artists here and there. And he created Flip Side. And then, I had a friend of mine who was working a lot with [inaudible 00:27:10] in the city, who was mostly Hispanic and Latin X artists. And she was like, "You inspired me to create that." And I was like, "Oh my goodness." I am so honored that me, as an Asian, can inspire a Hispanic artist to be like, "I want to help my community too." It took me a couple years, but I am now reaching back into my own community and making sure that we have a voice too.

Mikkoh:

Because I think, as Asian Americans, we are seen mostly as quiet and timid and shy and don't like to speak out about things, speak out against things. It's like a vicious cycle. Because we ... Nothing's going to change if we continue to be quiet. And I think it's time for us to stand up and create those safe spaces and tell our stories. The media tends to portray us, there's one or two, three characters that Asian people get casted in. It's awesome to see more Asian short films coming out, I know HBO's doing a lot with that. And more prominent Asian artists and actors. They just shot ... they're about to release the all Asian cast movie, Crazy Rich Asians, which is crazy. I would've never imagined that. I grew up seeing Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan and that was it.

Mikkoh:

So, yeah, I think it's crazy. Because I'm here in Atlanta, which is predominately Black people. And this whole Black Lives Matter thing has cascaded out into these other POC groups. I think it's crazy. Because I think we all still stand together, even though it's all separate groups. I think they're empowering all these other POCs too. So, it's really cool being in Atlanta.

Amena:

Yeah. I love how ... There are two things you said that really just I think are so important. I love how there's all this layering to how we affect change. And a part of that is, for those of us who are people of color or exist in other marginalized groups, a part of it is being with your people and knowing the story of your people and elevating the leaders, the influencers, the stories of your people. And then, from that, I think a lot of times does come this collaborative element, where for me as a Black woman, I'm like, "I want to tell the stories of my grandmothers and these women who came before me. And I want to elevate the voices of other Black women." Well, then that becomes other thoughts that I have. Like, when I go into different spaces, well then that turns into, "Well, where are the Asian American women? Why are we not calling upon the Asian American women to lead these things?" "Where are the Latinas? How can we call upon their leadership here?" "Where are the Native American women?" And so on.

Amena:

It just opens up my mind more and more whenever I get into an open door or when I get into an opportunity, how is this an opportunity for other people of color also? For other women of color? I think it sort of becomes this really beautiful wholistic thing where we are looking for equity and we are building things that say that our voices are important and that our stories are important. And as we do that, we sort of find these spaces where we all end up working together. You know? Which, I think is so beautiful to be a part of.

Amena:

Another thing that I was thinking from what you shared too, my friend Kathy Khang, who I actually interviewed for this podcast. I was just at an event this past weekend and heard her speak. She was just talking about how she wants the story of Asian Americans to be broadened. Because she was like, "There is so much more to us than what has been told of us." And she said, "We all speak different languages, we are coming from different ..." She was like, "It's not even like we are all speaking ..." She was like, "When people use this term Asian American," she was like, "It's not even like we all share a language. We're all speaking different languages and coming from these different beautiful cultures and want to celebrate the richness of all of it."

Amena:

It was really impactful to so many people in the audience when she shared that. But in particular, to every Asian American woman that was in the audience just walking up to her after she spoke and just feeling so seen and known by what she said. And just every woman of color in that room is looking at Kathy saying these things going, "Yes, yes!" We don't want our narratives to be flattened. We want to express the richness of who we are. That's what I hear and what you're saying.

Amena:

I want to talk about DJing for a moment here. Because obviously I'm very into it and have become a snob about it, bless my heart today. But I wanted to know, for you, out of all of the hip hop genres, you know, break dancing and graffiti and beat boxing and MCing and so on, you have all these options of what you could do, what you could pick to be a facet of hip hop that you would engage with. What was it about DJing that made you go, "I think I'm going to give that a try."?

Mikkoh:

Oh man. I think it's the fact that, I mean, when you're a musician, I feel like a lot of musicians are tied to one genre. And with DJing, I mean, I listen to so many types of music. And I'm sure a lot of other people out there are like that. But how can I take that and be able to present that as an art form? I think that's what ultimately drew me to it. I was raised on my mom's old vinyl collection. She listened to the Beatles and Holland Oates and Elton John. She loves funk music and stuff like that. Then I grew up in Georgia, near Atlanta, where I was exposed to hip hop music and R and B and soul. How can I blend all of these genres together? That's what I guess ultimately drew me to DJing.

Mikkoh:

When I'm on stage, it's really ... I feel like I just go into a trance. After every performance I'm like, "What just happened?" But it really is crazy, this small Asian American girl can control physical body movements and emotions of hundreds of people in one location. I think that's a really powerful thing. I do that through music. Other people, you do it through your words and the way that you speak. For me, music is that channel for me. Yeah, being in Atlanta really influenced me a lot. Because even the type of music I play, I play open format, but the type of music that ... I get a little bit into producing here and there. And the type of music I want to make is stuff that hits really hard on the low end, like bass, like the hip hop beats. But then, I also, I'm trained classically in piano and flute and stuff. So, I love the orchestral sounding melodies on top and something that really kind of swells emotions in you. Yeah, music is such a powerful medium.

Amena:

It's my biggest ... Of all the arts, it's what inspires me the most, even though it is not the art I do. If I want to be inspired, I want to go and see DJs work. And I'm very ... I want to be where I can see your hands working. Or I want to go see someone perform live music. There's something about the music ... I mean, I love music, period. I'm listening to it all the time. But there's something about the live music experience of watching what an artist can do on stage, which is this very interesting conversation, where you might be there DJing and I'm there standing in the crowd. And I'm not literally like, "Mikkoh, what you been up to? What you doing?" Those things. But we are a part of this conversation where you are saying something with the music that you make, that you spin. And then you're having to wait and see in the crowd, what's the crowd saying back? Is the crowd saying back, "Oh, that is my song!" Or whatever it is.

Amena:

Sometimes, I watch my husband do this too, sometimes the crowd is saying, "Eh, not me. Not so much." And you're like, "Okay, got to pick this other thing and see how that goes." Just having to be so fluid and flexible in those moments and being willing to see what the music wants to do that night. I mean, that is so, so inspiring to me. I've talked to you about art and activism, how you are just partnering with Collaboration in strategy and operations, just providing more platform for Asian American performing artists. But you are also involved in the intersection of art and wellness, which I also find really interesting. Because I'm sure you and I could say about our own lives, and for many artists that we know, that sometimes as artists, we are neglecting our wellness.

Mikkoh:

For sure.

Amena:

We're performing and doing all the stages. And sometimes our art involves us being very vulnerable about things that are going on in our lives. But we're not always in the healing process really. I want you to talk more about the Missed Appointment, which is a project that you've been working on. Tell me more about this and how do art and wellness intersect for you?

Mikkoh:

Man, I think it goes hand in hand. Especially people who are artists and creatives and ... For me, I'm very much both left and right brained. So, I'm very analytical and critical of myself. But then this other part of me is just very free and freeform and want to create and I have so many ideas. And then this other side's like, "Well, how are you going to implement this?" I feel like my brain is constantly just going crazy, fighting back and forth. As creatives, we need that moment of rest, those days of self care. That's something that's always been a constant theme, and thing that I really have to remind myself over and over again.

Mikkoh:

A really good friend of mine, Daisy Jane, she is actually ... I met her through back in the day when I was just starting DJing, even before that. And when I was trying to get into the arts scene here in Atlanta and stuff. She has been in med school for years now. She's about to graduate. But she is all about wholistic wellness, functional medicine. And her, as an Asian American herself, she's Filipino, she is really about reaching back into our roots as well and finding those healing I guess rituals and stuff like that. She approached me with this idea that she had just been ... She's been writing for years, and she really wanted to create it in a visual form.

Mikkoh:

So, we ended up releasing season one last year, it was a nine episode series, where she wrote most of the episodes and I would kind of say things here and there, contribute there a little bit. But mostly, I shot the video, edited, got a team together to do animations and sound and coloring. And we even had Preston Music on it and had a friend who took all the film photographs that we use as B Roll. I think most of us were Asian too, which is crazy. Because would have never have imagined making something like that with a team. We just kind of did episodes that were related to self care, mental wellness, healing foods. I think that's really important, the way that you eat and what you put in your body. Not even just the content that you feed on, that you look at and read, it's the actual food that goes in your body that's really important.

Mikkoh:

We created the Missed Appointment. Yeah, I mean, we are actually working on season two right now, which is crazy that you brought that up. But yeah, we're pivoting a little bit into interviewing other people. Honestly, for us, it's not really an educational medium, it's more of inspiring others to create their own self care routines. Because I don't think there is one answer.

Amena:

That's good.

Mikkoh:

I think everybody's different. Yeah, I think seeing an inside peek into the way other people take care of themselves can inspire you to kind of create your own routine. Yeah, I think as a creative that's so important. So, when she asked me to partner with her on that, I was like, "Yes, I am so down, girl. That is something that I've actually been looking for." That's a journey that I'm still on, and that I'm going to continue to be on. It was really cool, working with DJ on that. Because I think it really changed my health habits too, in the middle of working on all this. And I'm just sitting here editing videos. But seeing her really passionate about it, was really, really cool. She is on her way to become a psychiatrist because she's just really passionate about helping people. Yeah, this is kind of her way into bringing other people into her practice and stuff.

Amena:

Wow. I love that. And I love the idea of being able to bring people into a conversation about how you establish self care practices for yourself. I know that is a thing I'm still working on, trying to learn how do I pause and take care of myself? And I've had to really, just with some health challenges that I've had in the past few years, really like, "No, seriously girl, stop and make a priority of this or your body is not going to do the things that you would like it to do." And then experiencing the tensions of when you start taking care of yourself, you sometimes have less time to do the things that other people want you to do all the time. Then that like, "Oh, I don't have time to do your work for you because I need to take care of myself."

Amena:

What are some things, Mikkoh, that you could share with our listeners that may be creatives or just may be in a field or in a season of time that they're struggling with that? What are some ways that you go through your own self care practice or tips that you would have for people, just simple steps that they could take towards not just focusing on making creative work, but taking care of your soul as you participate in your creativity?

Mikkoh:

Yeah. I mean, I think for me, time management is a big I guess thing that I have to tackle. I've gotten into the habit of actually scheduling in Google Calendar me time. And I think that's so important because the whole concept behind the Missed Appointment is the missed appointment is those little appointments with yourself that you keep missing. And your missed appointment can be calling your mom or it can be taking a bubble bath and just chilling out. Or going and having some alone time with yourself. For me, I'm really good about making appointments with other people, updating my Google Calendar, making everything look good. But then I was not good about actually setting that time for myself. So, now I've gotten into the habit of actually scheduling it into my calendar. And I think that's really important.

Mikkoh:

Because all of us, I feel like a lot of us, we try, we're like, "Yeah, we'll get to it, we'll get to it." And we keep putting it off. And that's what your missed appointments are. Me, I ... I mean, for example, on Sundays, my brother and I, we have this tradition called Home Improvement Sundays. We have a little anthem for it and everything too. Sundays, we just work on home improvement projects that we've been putting off. The past couple Sundays, for example, we've been pouring concrete and making planters. Or making ... I sanded and stained and made a shelf a couple weeks ago. Having that time to myself where I can just do something that's totally irrelevant to my work and my creative work. Well, it's kind of creative, but it's something that I wouldn't usually do. It's not anything I do to make money. But I think ... I mean, it makes me feel really great when I do it. And then when I look at it throughout the week, I'm like, "Man, I made that." And that encourages me. And I'm like, "I can do this."

Amena:

I love it. I love it, Mikkoh. I was just talking to my husband about this today. I was like, "I feel like I need to do a better job of making our house home." I feel like our house almost, if we're in a busy season of time, our house just turns into the place where you shower.

Mikkoh:

Yes. And maybe sleep a little.

Amena:

Yeah. You went to bed and you ate some food. But you're basically coming in and dropping a bunch of things, like mail, bags, equipment, whatever. Then you're going to go to sleep, eat whatever, you're going to pick up that stuff, take it out again. And you just do that over all these weeks. And I was like, "This summer, maybe I need to have ..." I was like, "Maybe I will take this advice from Mikkoh." Maybe I need to have a make it home Mondays. Huh? Huh? And do something like this. Get some curtains going. You know? Just get some of these plastic furniture things out of here and get some real furniture made of wood or something, I don't know. But those are things that just are helping you to remind yourself you're worthy of having a space that you love or you can have peace and comfort and be rejuvenated after all the stuff you do to give out in the world. I love that.

Amena:

So inspiring, talking with Mikkoh. For more information about Mikkoh, visit Mikkoh.Co. She is also the creative director at Poly Visuals and the co founder of a genre-bending dance party called Down For Whatever. You can find out more info at PolyVisuals.Studio. And you can follow Down For Whatever on Instagram at D-W-N-F-O-R-W-H-T-E-V-R. But you don't have to worry about keeping up with all this while you drive or workout or distract yourself at work or whatever you're doing while you're listening to this podcast. Because all this info and more will be in the show notes at AmenaBrown.com/HERwithAmena. Thanks for listening.

Amena:

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 iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 53

Amena Brown:

Hey, y'all. Welcome back to another weekly episode of HER With Amena Brown, and I welcome you all to our living room. Welcome back to those of you that are here every week or almost every week tuning in. We've had a wonderful year of episodes, y'all. I know, I'm already feeling like sentimental as the year is about to end, which is usual for me.

Amena Brown:

I'm already like in the recap and just thinking about all of the wonderful conversations we've had, all of the great guests we've had. Thank you so much for listening, and for those of you that popped in here and it's your first episode today, welcome. This episode, you are potentially listening to this the week before or the week of Halloween. I have actually been talking with my sister, Jamie about Halloween traditions, and I thought it would be cool for us to talk about that, and I would love to talk more about this on social media, so I'll try to put out a question when I do the social media post for this episode to hear what are some of your favorite Halloween traditions for those of you that celebrate. For the most part, I did not grow up celebrating Halloween.

Amena Brown:

Both sides of my family, my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family are church-going folks, so for the most part, I just remember long swatches of life where I did not celebrate Halloween in the traditional sense that a lot of the kids I went to school with would have, but there are certain Halloweens I remember here and there where I actually got to dress up, and it didn't have to be a biblical character. I want to give a shout-out to those of you who are listening that grew up in a church or religious setting and the countless ways that those spaces tried to give you some semblance of what Halloween could be like without encouraging you to do the devil's work, which is basically how Halloween was viewed in my religious upbringing, okay? My earliest, it's kind of interesting because I was going to tell y'all my earliest memory of celebrating Halloween, but I think it's actually out of order because I'm like, "Surely, I had to be eight years old at what is one of my ..." What I was going to say is my earliest memory, but I actually have a memory before that, so I'm going to tell you my ... Maybe it's my earliest memory now that I'm thinking about it, y'all, because it was the first time I really had a vision for a full costume.

Amena Brown:

It might actually have been the only time that I really had a vision for a costume that I remember having to work at somewhat. I'll start with this, and then I want to share with you a couple of other memorable Halloween things for me. I remember when I was eight years old, I was very much a big fan of Janet Jackson. Obviously, I'm early entry into this moment. I'm right there, loving the Control album.

Amena Brown:

Even as a six-year old, I was loving that album, so anything that Janet Jackson subsequently put out after that, like please. I had the posters on my wall, any magazines I read that interviewed Janet Jackson during my childhood. I had those cutouts on my wall. I believe I wrote to Janet Jackson's fan club twice, y'all, and included my school picture for her as well. I never got any correspondence back, but I do remember doing that, and I kind of wish that I had electronic versions of that, because I would be very curious as to what I thought it was important to tell Janet Jackson, but it's important to tell you that I was a fan of Janet because my first Halloween costume that I ever envisioned for myself was to be Janet Jackson for Halloween.

Amena Brown:

I'm going to tell you right now that the actual implementation of that, I don't think if I saw a picture of myself or if you saw the picture, that you would be like, "Got it. That's Janet Jackson," because I didn't really have like a look. You know how Janet in the early days wore like a lot of black? It was sort of like a black blazer, black kind of fitted pants, or it was black jeans with like the black T-shirt tucked in. Those would all be things that would subsequently make one think of Janet Jackson.

Amena Brown:

I think that I decided to dress very well for the '80s, and I think now that I have talked to y'all about this, I don't think I actually ended up dressing anything like Janet Jackson. I think my original inspiration for my costume was to be Janet Jackson. I think at the end, I ended up dressing up as a Janet Jackson fan. I remember I was wearing a stonewashed jeans skirt with a lavender top, and I had lavender socks to match, and I think I put on ... I can't remember if I was wearing church shoes or sneakers with those lavender socks, and I think my mom may have let me put a little bit of like some sort of lavender eyeshadow on or something, and I went out there with my little pumpkin pale and received my candy, but that's my strongest, like I had a vision for my outfit, Halloween costume memory, but let me tell you one of my most embarrassing moments in life, is also connected to Halloween.

Amena Brown:

When I was six, which this is why I told y'all, these stories are out of order, right? I was eight years old when I attempted my Janet Jackson costume, but my most embarrassing and probably earliest memory of dressing up for Halloween was when I was six years old. This was the year that I was in first grade, and I actually lived with my grandmother in North Carolina. My grandmother lived in a small town in North Carolina, same town where both my mom and dad were raised, and so I lived with my grandmother for that year because my mom was in basic training, I believe. I may be getting the actual training, or my mom was in training because she had joined the Army.

Amena Brown:

She was going to become a nurse in the Army. She was already a nurse, so she was going into the Army to further her work in the medical field, and a part of that, which is true for most folks in the military at some point, a part of that means if you have kids, if you have a family, you have your sort of community base, you have to leave them for a period of time, and my mom was at the portion of that, where she would've needed to leave me for so long. It made more sense for me to stay with my grandmother for that school year versus going with her when she went to her training in Denver. I'm living with my grandmother, and I have talked many times here about my grandma because she's just wonderful and entertaining as well, but I have a lot of foundational memories with her because I spent a lot of time with her when I was a little girl, and of course, now that she and my mom and my sister, Makeda live here in Atlanta, I've had even more time to have all these wonderful and hilarious memories with her. This year, I am going from having lived in closer to Durham, North Carolina, so I wouldn't consider Durham to be this like huge, bustling city, but it's definitely a more city place.

Amena Brown:

It's more of a big city than the town where my grandmother lived at the time, and so I had gone to kindergarten there, and then now living with my grandmother. Living with my grandmother wasn't like a foreign concept because we visited her all the time, she visited at us all the time, so I remember having a lot of memories, spending time with her there. I'll tell you what's interesting about celebrating Halloween with my grandmother. My grandmother grew up just like my mom and dad grew up in a Pentecostal Holiness Church environment. When I lived with her, she was still attending a Pentecostal Holiness Church, and there are some things I realized about my grandma's chosen rebellion that I love very much as a grown woman, like the type of church that my grandma was raised in, and subsequently continued going to as an adult, it was a type of church where women weren't supposed to wear makeup. You weren't supposed to do what were considered secular things, right?

Amena Brown:

Obviously, celebrating Halloween would be included in that, but that would also include, they would've deemed secular music, which meant music that you would not be singing in church or music that was not written to be about God or sung in a congregation of some kind, right? This would include the movies. The movies would've been considered secular. This also influenced the way that women were supposed to dress, women were supposed to be "Very modest," which in Pentecostal Holiness tradition meant skirts down to the ankles. It meant women didn't wear pants.

Amena Brown:

It meant we should never be seeing your cleavage, we should hardly even see your collarbone. Maybe we won't even see your shoulders because all of those things were considered to be potential stumbling blocks for men. I'm just going to have a moment of silence right there. Anyways, so I want you to imagine that my grandma, with her Pentecostal Holiness roots, had decided long ago, before I ever went to live with her, that she was just wearing pants because of the type of work that she did. She worked in a institutional hospital setting, where she had to work with young boys that had been institutionalized, and so a part of that was you had to play softball sometimes, you had to be able to do different things that you needed to be able to move however you needed to move, and she discovered me doing this in a skirt is not going to do, so she was like, "The church people going to deal. I'm wearing my pants, and that's that."

Amena Brown:

That's my young memory of my grandmother, that she went to church every Sunday, she played the piano for the church choir, and she wore her pants, and they could just be mad about it. Looking back on it, it really is surprising to me that she let me dress up for Halloween that year that I lived with her. I had a cousin named Al, and Al's birthday was near Halloween, and Al came from ... Y'all, y'all know how family is. Okay, so my great-grandmother, my grandma's mother, she had eight siblings.

Amena Brown:

Most of whom were all still living either in or near the town where my grandmother lived, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. A lot of my cousins, they were really sometimes second cousins to me or third cousins, but because of my grandma's station in the family, even though my grandma was my great-grandmother's daughter, a lot of her cousins really viewed her as an aunt, as if she were an additional sibling in a way. I go to my cousin Al's house, and Al is the same age as me, or close in age to me. We're probably within a year of each other, and because his birthday was near Halloween, I mean, why wouldn't he have a Halloween-themed birthday party? I don't remember if it was my idea.

Amena Brown:

I'm thinking it was my idea, that I mentioned to my grandma I wanted to dress up as a witch, and I'm going to tell y'all, if you didn't grow up in a Pentecostal Holiness type of church situation, or if you didn't grow up just religious, you may be like, "What's wrong with dressing up as a witch?" When you grow up in a certain religious environment, that is the devil's work, period. No one is interested in you being dressed up as witch. No, but for some reason, that's what I wanted to do. I don't remember why, so she kind of let me have ...

Amena Brown:

I wouldn't even say it was a half-costume. She let me have a 25% costume. She took me to the toy store and got me the black, pointy hat, and it also came with some plastic fingernails, but instead of you gluing them, they were made so that you could just like pop them on to your fingertips. They were like little plastic circles, and you would just pop them on to your fingertips, and then when you flipped your hands around, you would have the "Witch nails." Then, I basically had on my usual kid stuff, pair of jeans, shirt, sneakers, went to the party, so we went to the party at my Aunt Daisy May's house, who was my great-grandmother's sister, and my Aunt Daisy May was Al's grandmother.

Amena Brown:

Okay. Yes, I did say Aunt Daisy May. That's spelled what would seem like it should be pronounced, Daisy May, but no, no. We're from North Carolina. That's Daisy May, and I can't argue with you about it. It's just how it is, okay?

Amena Brown:

I'm at the party, this place is crawling with children, and then there are like few adults in the kitchen, a few adults kind of on the back patio, and all us kids just hanging out, having fun, playing games, having a good time. Okay. Well, my memory of Aunt Daisy May's house is that it seemed like it was such a huge house to me as a kid, but I only remember there being one bathroom, and my Aunt Daisy May raise so many kids in that house. I can't imagine that there was only one bathroom, but I'm going to tell y'all, that there was only one bathroom I knew about, okay? It was on the hall.

Amena Brown:

We all typically in our homes have the bathroom that guests are allowed to use, or for some of us, we just have one bathroom, and then we have to try to make sure things are swiped off the counters and thrown somewhere where guests can't see if they have to use our bathroom that we use every day. There was the one bathroom that all the guests could use, which meant all of the children who were there, there was always a long line to use the bathroom, and I must have played and played and played and played until it was like a pressing matter for me to have to go to the bathroom now, so I had to go really bad, then I get in line, and I'm already behind five or six people in line. Finally get into the bathroom. Y'all, I had to go to the bathroom so bad, I pulled my jeans down, but I forgot to pull my underwear down, so I peed everywhere. Like everything, like underwear are done.

Amena Brown:

There's pee on the jeans now, and y'all, this is actually true to form for me. When I think about this moment, I'm like, "This is very true to form for something that I would feel in a moment." I felt so embarrassed that it just stunted me, and I just sat in the bathroom. I didn't know what to do, so finally, I think behind me, there was a mother who was with her kid, and she asked me, could she come in? She wanted to make sure I was okay, and she came in and assessed the situation, and she went to get my grandma, so my grandma comes in, and I don't remember if I cried about this.

Amena Brown:

I just remember being very still and very like, "Oh my gosh, I'm embarrassed. I don't know what to do," and y'all, I'm going to tell you what my grandma decided as the problem solving for this moment. My grandma decided that the best solution was to get a bunch of paper towels and stuff them inside my jeans because it would help them dry. I'm going to have to bring grandma on the podcast and see if we can get an answer to this, but she stuffed the paper towels in there and tried to dry everything off as best she could with the rest of the paper towels, got me back, dressed again and sent me out to play. I probably stayed and played for another hour or two, and every now and then, the other kids would be like, "It smells like pee over here," but they could never figure out that it was me.

Amena Brown:

Of course, I'm thinking back on this moment, and I'm like, "I wonder why my grandma didn't take me back to her house and change my clothes, bring me back to the party," because Goldsboro is not that big of a town, you know? Then, I thought to myself, "Hmm, now that I'm an adult ..." Not that I would advise stuffing paper towels down the pants of a child that's had this type of accident. However, I understand the fatigue an adult experiences, and I understand my grandmother may be thinking to herself, "Hmm, if I go back to my house, I'm not coming back, so this child can either decide if we going home right now or if we going to try to come up with a short-term solution so you could continue playing and celebrating cousin Al's birthday, and then we go home." I want you all to know that that was one of my most embarrassing moments.

Amena Brown:

I don't know, maybe that's why I don't really celebrate Halloween today, but shout out to those paper towels, I guess. Anyways, after that six, eight ... I just don't remember Halloween anymore. I don't remember celebrating that or going trick-or-treating, although I'm certain I did. My next memories are church related memories, because when I turned 12, my mom and my sister and I had moved from North Carolina to San Antonio, Texas. Actually, no.

Amena Brown:

I'm skipping a step. We went from living in North Carolina after my mom finished her training, and now she was officially in the Army. Our first place that we were stationed was in the D.C. area, so I went to school in the DMV. Shout out to those of you that are from that area. I went to school there for a few years. My sister was born there, and then my mom actually got out of the military and decided to get back in the military, and so the military moved us to San Antonio, Texas.

Amena Brown:

When we moved to Texas, my mom had had a period of time before that, that we weren't really going to church, unless we were at my grandma's house, or maybe every now and then. There was a Sunday we went, but that wasn't like a regular part of our routine. When we moved to Texas, I was about 12, my sister was about two years old, my mom started going back to church on a regular basis. She really wanted to work on her relationship with God, right? That was my life from 12 all the way through high school, was church life.

Amena Brown:

I spent most of my extracurricular time, for the most part, was in church activities, and I remember our church used to have a Halloween event, but instead of it being called Halloween, it was called Joy Night, and you were typically encouraged at Joy Night to either dress up as a historical figure from Black history, because we were attending a Black church. You were encouraged to dress up as someone from Black history, or you were encouraged to dress up as a biblical character. There was basically like fun and games and stuff at the church, and then we were either getting bags of candy at the church or there was some other arrangement where you could kind of feel like you got a chance to trick-or-treat. I also want to make a note for y'all, that Joy Night stood for Jesus Over You, and for those of you who grew up in church, be blessed that I know that made you laugh. Then, I also, of course, once I married my husband, at the time that we got married, my husband was a youth pastor, so the church that he was a youth pastor at, their Halloween tradition for the kids was a trunk-and-treat.

Amena Brown:

That was my first time experiencing that, where different people from the church park in the church parking lot, but with all of their trunks facing out. Everybody's like, instead of backing in, everybody's like pulled in that way. Trunks are open, and then each person with their car there brings candy, and then the kids kind of go from car to car as their trick-or-treat experience, and then there were other games and food and stuff, which was like pretty fun, like communal type of activity, but I don't remember dressing up for that, and I don't remember any of my costumes when I used to do those church events as a child. I just, I don't remember that. Now, here I am as an adult. Halloween has become a very lazy experience.

Amena Brown:

It's turned into a very lazy experience, everyone, and part of that is because the house that my husband and I have lived in for, oh my gosh, seven years this year, our street is not populated with a lot of children. I think there are only three or four children, like school-age, that live on our street that I can think of. Our first time, our first Halloween in this house, we were super prepared. We turned on our porch light and bought our little candy, and we were like ready for everybody to come to our door, and no one came and we kept looking at the street and no one's walking down the street. That was when we learned we will not get the plus of being able to have sort of like neighborhood Halloween celebrations, which I would totally love if our street were like that, but we didn't have that.

Amena Brown:

We would have friends sometimes who would invite us over to their neighborhoods, where they were doing this kind of celebration for their kids, and then we would sit out with them while the other kids came up to them for trick-or-treating stuff. I have basically chosen, for the last 10 years of my life, one Halloween costume, and I have stuck with it. It's a Halloween costume that I started out calling a B-girl costume. Basically, this is me wearing an Adidas track suit, and if you have followed me on social media or have seen me perform live, you know that I just wear Adidas track suits. I don't even know that this counts as a Halloween costume, but it's what I do because I have it, it's easy to put together, it doesn't require a lot of to do.

Amena Brown:

I don't have to buy a wig. I can just really wear my hair just like I normally wear it. I can put together an outfit with some sneakers I actually have. I don't know if that means I just have clothes. It look like the '80s all the time anyways. Apparently, I have affinity for this era for some reason.

Amena Brown:

That's my outfit. The one how Halloween costume that I've always wanted to do in my adult life but I haven't done is, it's like a onesie, but it's black, and then it's just like the skeleton, the bones. I feel like if I'm going to trade lazy Halloween costumes, I'm going to go from my Adidas track suit B-girl situation to that, and I'm probably just going to wear that every year. I feel like those are my vibes. I want to give a special shout-out to the love of candy because that's really, for me, what Halloween is about.

Amena Brown:

I do still enjoy that feeling of glee after you would go trick-or-treating as a kid. You'd come home with all this wonderful candy. I want to give a shout-out to the people who are giving out regular size candy instead of the snack sizes. I mean, what a bonus you are giving to the trick-or-treaters. I want to give a shout-out to you, and I want to give a special shout-out to all the Halloween candy that's on sale the day after.

Amena Brown:

Now, as an adult, trick-or-treating is way less enticing because first of all, I have particularities about candy. Sometimes you would go trick-or-treating, and you'd pass by that one person's house, and they had like the Boston baked beans instead of the Snickers you were hoping for, or you got the Butterfinger out of that variety bag, and you didn't get the KitKat or whatever, but you had to just ride with it because now, it's all in your bag. You had to kind of divide it up, hope you could trade some of it the next day at school or whatever, but a plus to becoming an adult is just being like, "I don't even want the rest of those candies. I don't want to suffer through your bad candy choices. I can literally go to the store and buy the candy I like."

Amena Brown:

For me, I mean, top five off the top of my head, I mean, Snickers is really right off the top on that. I'm not going to lie about it, y'all. Snickers, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, that's a find. KitKat is going to go on there, and I'm just going to tell y'all as a special mention that there are a lot of varieties of KitKat now, some of which I'm interested in the innovation, some of which I'm a little concerned about. I'm going to say Twix on a number four.

Amena Brown:

Who doesn't love that cookie and the caramel mixed together? I'm going to go for that, and then I'm going to put number five Halloween candy for me, it's going to be the M&M's. I really, for the most part, haven't met an M&M I didn't like, you know? I like it with peanuts. I like it without peanuts.

Amena Brown:

I like those mint ones. I like the ones that have the peanut butter in there. I really haven't met one of those that I didn't like. All M&M's are welcome with me. I mean, those are my top five candies. If you start getting into like you're about to put lemon drops in my little pumpkin that I'm putting my candy in, who cares?

Amena Brown:

I can go to the store and just buy those five things I just named and just what, eat them, okay? Special shout out to being able to go the day after Halloween, and what, rack up on all that candy on sale. Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you celebrate Halloween, happy Halloween to you. If you don't, I still hope you get some candy that you like.

Amena Brown:

Talk to y'all soon. 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 iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 52

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. It's rare these days that I get to record with guests in person, but I was able to record this week's episode in person as I was filming video for Bethaney B. Wilkinson's book launch for her new book The Diversity Gap: Where Good Intentions Meet True Cultural Change. Listen in as Bethaney talks about the creative process behind her book, advice that she would give women of color as they navigate workspaces, and how she cares for herself as a Black woman leader. Check it out.

Amena Brown:

Hey everybody, welcome to a book celebration. This is a celebration, okay. I'm happy to be your host. I am spoken word poet and host of the podcast HER With Amena Brown, and I am Amena Brown. So that worked out pretty good, right? And we are here to be in conversation with Bethaney B. Wilkinson author of, and I'm going to hold this book up 10,000 times, do y'all understand me? I'm going to hold this up as many times as I can because every time I hold it up, I want you to think I need to buy five of those, I know five people that need this book, I need to buy 10 of those. We're here with Beth B Wilkinson, author of The Diversity Gap: Where Good Intentions Meet True Cultural Change. And I'm excited to be your host today not only because I respect Bethaney's work so much, but also because she's my friend. So our time together today is going to be a combination of book event, conversation, and girlfriend time, that is what we're bringing you.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

That's it.

Amena Brown:

So Bethaney, talk to me, this is a big accomplishment, your book is out. These are my out fingers, your book is out now. It's out now, how do you feel?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

That is a big question and a good one. I feel a lot of things, I feel so many things, I feel firstly just humbled and honored and grateful to be in conversation with you because I admire you so much. And you've been such a big part of my book writing journey just as a person, as a creative. But I feel excited, I'm excited for people to read it, I'm excited for people to grapple with the ideas, to explore what it looks like to apply those ideas. I am nervous because writing a book where you talk about racism and white supremacy in 2021 can be stressful. You never know what the people are going to say or do or how the internet's going to respond. So I'm a little nervous about that. I feel grateful, I feel ready, I feel ready for this moment. I feel like it's been a long time coming, lots of hours, lots of tears, lots of emotional work and labor and release and relief even. And so I feel ready, I'm here.

Amena Brown:

I love that. I love that ready is the word that came to your mind, I love that. That feels so powerful. And I want to talk a little bit about the process that led to this book because you and I both as writers remember the moments where we would be at someone else's event watching them tell their story about their book. Now, I feel this thing inside like I know I'm supposed to write books too, wow, the dream inside. And for me for a while not knowing that many authors to be able to find out how does the process actually happen, how does it just go from being a dream maybe you had when you were a little girl or at some other point in life to now this is reality? So take us back, how did you arrive at the point where you were like, "I'm going to write a book"? What was that process like?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

So I think, not even I think, I wanted to write a book for a long time. I think my whole life loved writing. English was always my jam, it's the gift that I love to bring to the world always. So I knew I wanted to write a book probably from the time I was really little. But as I became an adult, it was this very mysterious process. It seems like there's this group of people and they had the book writing class in high school, I missed that class. But I would say there were a couple of experiences that really shifted that for me. One was hearing you actually speak at an event in 2016 where you unpacked how as a writer it's important to create a book proposal because that helps you know if you have enough to actually fill a book or is it just a blog post or is it an ebook?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

That framing really helped me because I was like, "I have a lot of things to say, but do I have enough to say to fill a book? And then what size book?" So making that really practical decision was important like, okay, I need to have enough to say to fill a book. But then also I had another mentor tell me, "Hey, Bethaney, authors are people who have something to say, so what do you want to say?" And when it came down to it, I was like, "Well, I have a lot of thoughts and opinions, but what I want to say right now is that hello people, racism's the problem in your organizations, it's not just recruiting diverse talent." At the time, that was the thing that I had a lot to say about. And so thinking through all these different pieces, I was like, "Okay, I'm ready because I have something to say. I think I have enough to say to fill an entire book." And that was probably in 2017, 20 18 that I came to that conclusion.

Amena Brown:

Okay. So I want to talk about the journey from I think I'm going to write a book to I know it's gonna be about the diversity gap. I remember my last book, the frame of the book came to me first that I knew how I wanted chapters to be structured and all those things. And then I was like, "Crap, what am I going to say? I haven't thought about the frame of this, what am I going to say?" And then it took a moment in life where I knew it is this that is supposed to go in the frame of that book. So you had these ideas because you were already doing work in, I guess what we would now call in corporate or nonprofit type of world in DEI, in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, you are already doing some work there. In what would be in some faith-based spaces would be considered racial reconciliation work. You are already doing some of that work there. So you had an inkling like something in this is book. How did you know the diversity gap is what this book was gonna be?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I think part of that was listening closely to my own experience. I lived the diversity gap before I wrote about it being the first or only Black women on these teams and these organizations constantly or regularly having to or choosing to speak into the racial dynamics of those places. I was living it, and so it made sense to me to expound upon that. I would also say that I had some training in it through my education and then just my experience. Well, I have a day where I sat down with index cards, this process this might work for some people. It might not work for others, but it worked for me where I took index cards, three by five index cards, I bought a little box. And I just wrote out every idea, every author, every thought leader, every reference I had in just my body, in my mind related to race, racial justice, organizational culture, and leadership.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

And I had hundreds of cards by the end of writing them all down. And then I sorted them all into categories. I did that probably a couple times to see, okay, what's really sticking out, what's not? And then I started to piece them together. It was an iterative process of listening to my own experience, listening to the tensions I would say of other people around me as well because I wanted to create something that I knew would be helpful and then organizing what I knew based on what I'd read and heard. I'm a big learner, I'm very curious, so I just needed to pull it all together. I was honestly driving down the road one day on my way to go meet a friend when the title The Diversity Gap came to me. And so it wasn't that I knew that was going to happen, it was just what should I call this? And I don't know where it came from, it just dropped in my spirit while I was driving to Decatur.

Amena Brown:

I love that because I do remember before writing a book people saying things to me like it will just come to you certain things. And that would just sound so strange and very mysterious and not practical at all to me when they say those thing. But that is a part of the book writing process that there are these mysterious moments in a way that it comes to you and your soul knows this is what is next a part of the process or this is what this is supposed to be even if you don't have all of the details yet. You didn't have all the details when The Diversity Gap came to you. But I love that, and I love that that mystery is a part of it. Sometimes I wish it wasn't because I love to have a lot of plans that are going to work out exactly the way I plan them is better for me. But writing a book's not like that. You can make lots of plans, you can have all of your outline and everything, and you have to be prepared that in the process there will obviously be some moments.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Absolutely. And I'm also a big fan of checking for what resonates with people. When I said the diversity gap to people, they got it without too much explanation. And I was looking for something that would be that simple because I knew that the diversity gap as a project, as an initiative would exist along multiple platforms. I have a podcast, I have event series, that sort of thing. So it was helpful once it did drop to find that it resonated with others. I think that was an important part of my process.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, no, I get that. Let me ask about your book writing process, and this is just a nosy curiosity of mine. I would like to know what were the things that you needed when you were writing this. What were the must haves once you got into the writing process? I'll tell you a couple of mine. I craved a lot of carbohydrates whenever I'm in book writing mode and then discovered that I can't exist on carbohydrates.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Not alone.

Amena Brown:

Alone, alone. I can exist. But brownies is not a solid nutrient.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Is it though? I mean, it might be.

Amena Brown:

And like it needs other things to supplement it, especially if that's what you're doing every day. I think now that I think about it maybe I needed something that was bringing a comfort to me or something. So that was brownies for a while. And then I was like, "Let me downgrade to dark chocolate, which at least has antioxidants."

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Yes, some nutritional benefits. Though I think butter and brownies does too, but I hear you.

Amena Brown:

It was nutritional to my soul at the very least. So I want to know from you what were the things, could be the snacks that you remember being your must have when you were writing this, was there music that you were listening to at the time? Give us a little window into that part.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

For me, it was all environmental. So I needed my space heater. And if I couldn't have my space heater, I needed my heated blanket. Something about the warmth helped me get snuggled in and comfortable. No matter what the temperature was outside, I needed those things. I also needed a candle. That just kind of, and it still does, it just brings me into the moment and helps me focus. So that was a big part of my process. I love a good glass of wine. So somewhere to the brownies, you got to reign it in after a period of time. But a good glass of wine would be really great and then of course coffee if it's morning time. So most of my things were environmental. Give me the warmth, give me the space heater, give me the cozy and my candle.

Amena Brown:

I love that, I love that. I actually had a friend tell me that lighting a candle is a part of her writing process. And I had never done that until recently. And I was like, "Oh, it does feel nice."

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

It does something, yeah. It's like it sets the intention.

Amena Brown:

Just that moment of watching this containable fire, I think there's something to that and the writing process. And that writing a book really ... And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this because for me because my books more so they were lending themselves to more of a memoir style. I felt like I was digging into my soul a lot and I didn't account for how hard that was going to be. Did you feel that in writing this book as well because this book was based on your research? And it was based on your lived experience in a lot of work environments. Did you feel that like, what's going on here?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Yes. I really love that you're asking this question because I think about it a lot in retrospect. I think there's a phenomenon in the world, in organizations where the experiences, the trauma of Black people and specifically Black women is manipulated, it's gawked at in a way that's really unhealthy and dysfunctional. And I had to be really focused on protecting myself, I needed boundaries. Every part of my story, I don't owe that to leaders, I just don't owe that to them. And I don't want my story to be used or commodified. And then there are other parts of my story that do really illustrate these points in ways that I need to illustrate some of these points.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

So it was a give and take, a push and pull for me because I was trying to not feed into the unhealthy reliance on black people's trauma to educate white folks and leaders while also telling the truth of our experiences. And so in some moments it was too much and I was like, "That's for the journal and for therapy, that's not for the world." And then there were other times where I could tell like, "Okay, I can share this story, I think it's the right one for me to give away." So I had to navigate those boundaries.

Amena Brown:

Oh, that's so smart. That's so smart and so wise and something that I hope I think about the next time that I write a book because I did not do that in my first experiences there. And that came back to bite me in some ways. I remember being in therapy post the book coming out, and of course my therapist was like, "Please remain in therapy while you're writing your next book." But she was also like, "Do that so that you can have the tools to weigh out, to be in a healthy place to weigh out what is ... Some things we write are healing for us even if they're never meant to be in the public. And then there are some things that we write that were healing for us at a time that we now feel in a place where we want to share that because we think it will be helpful for other people, but it does take being in a healthy place as a writer to be able to discern that. So I'm so glad that you were able to do that.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Well, it's interesting because I was writing a lot of it during summer 2020. And so I was having to make sense of my experience as a Black woman in a lot of different places, in a lot of different ways. And watching other authors, other Black folks share their experiences. I feel like I was a part of a broader community and we were all sorting out what's for me, what's for them, what's healing, what's retraumatizing? And so I was privy to those conversations, and it helped me to decide how I wanted to show up to this particular project because I had all of that online interaction if nothing else.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the content that's inside this book because some of the people that are watching this, they've got their books that in hand already, and some people that are tuning into this or will be listening to this, this will be their, "Oh, I need to get this book." And I remember the first time I heard you sharing the content from The Diversity Gap research. And I felt very emotional after your presentation, and I'm sure I felt that for layers of reasons. Obviously I felt it partly because you're my friend and I was just so proud of you because it was so brilliant. And getting to see that brilliance really expanded upon in this book was just wonderful to read. But my first time seeing you share this, share that this is why I'm calling this The Diversity Gap, this is what the people of color I interviewed said their workplaces were like when they were there thriving.

Amena Brown:

I remember that was a big part of your presentation, and it was so wonderful to me first of all to hear about people of color thriving in their workplaces. So that had to be like, okay, hearing that other people of color are saying this and your research says it's possible for there to be workplaces that are equitable, that are as safe as safe can be for people of color in America. So I felt this, oh my gosh, I'm so proud of her, oh my gosh, I'm glad that this could exist. I'm glad that there's going to be tools to help people who are like, "It doesn't exist at our workplace right now." So I want you to answer for us what do you want people who read this to gain from it?

Amena Brown:

There are going to be a lot of leaders reading this book, and there are a lot of leaders who need to know about this book so they can read it. And they're just going to be people whether they are in those leadership hiring C-suite positions, they're going to be people reading this also who felt like I felt, I felt very seen, I felt very heard and understood by the information you were rolling out to us at this event. So talk about that, what do you want people to gain from this? When somebody gets to, they get all the way to the index of this book, they read it from the dedication and they made it to the index, what are you hoping they walk away with?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I want them to walk away with a commitment to understanding the impact of their good intentions. And I want them to know that there are action steps they can take today to start creating an environment that is more dignifying and humanizing and celebratory and dignifying of people of color in their workplace. This is a second thing I want them to know, but I also want them to know that the issues we're facing exist beyond the four walls of the institution they're leading. They're societal, they're structural, they're systemic. And I don't say that to be overwhelming, I think a lot of times that makes people think, "Oh wow, I can't do anything about that." But no, it's just like you have to know what you're dealing with. You have to name it honestly to figure out your next best step in that direction.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

At the end of the book, I share, so I lay out all the things in the book. But at the end of the book, I share a section on experiments and strategies because I wanted to give everything I've seen and learned and heard about to the audience to say, "Hey, everything in this book's not for you. Take what works for you, scrap what doesn't, but find what works in your context. And I want people to understand the big picture and then have access to the tools to go do something about it."

Amena Brown:

That's one of my favorite things about this book is how practical it is and how it is really moving folks beyond what can be I think for some people, what we hope are the feel-good conversations. What we hope are, this is me telling my age a little Bethaney, but what we hope is the United Colors of Benetton of this moment, what we hope is the kumbaya because we all sat at a table and we ate injera together. And we had a beautiful conversation. You told me what makes you different from me, and I told you what makes me different from you. We think that's the work. And I love in this book that you are laying out that that is the very, very tip of the real work that we need to get to.

Amena Brown:

We need to not be so focused on what makes us feel good or feel better, but we actually need to look at the systems and practices of what we're doing in our work teams, how we actually make things more equitable. And that's going to take some leadership and some choices and some probably unpopular, uncomfortable decisions depending on the institution. Let's get into the book. The people need to hear a sample, a passage, Bethaney. Can you pick one of your ... I mean, it's hard to say, what is a favorite passage in a whole book that you wrote? But can you pick a passage that you would love to share with us? Give us a little glimpse of some things that are in this book.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Yes, absolutely. So one of my favorite chapters, it's like choosing from your children. But one of my favorite chapters is the second one, and it's all about impact over intentions. And in this chapter I share direct quotes from people I interviewed about their experiences in their majority white cultural context and organizations. So I want to read a little bit of what one woman said, and then I want to read some of the aggregating things that all of them said. This is a Black woman who works for a national faith-based nonprofit. In many of her roles, she was the only Black person on her team. Over time she has intentionally worked to shift her role within the organization to focus on working with other Black folks and other underrepresented racial minorities. So she's pivoting while she's working in this one organization. My question to her was, if you could tell your white peers one thing without fear of being misunderstood or silenced, what would it be?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

And she said, this is her quote, she says, "You will never understand the real cost of being in my body within this white space." Recognize there is a cost, a holistic cost. For you, you just have to show up to work each day. But for me and for other non-white folks, we have to show up to work and deal with your microaggressions and deal with creating strategy for all the people of color and do our jobs excellently because we know we're going to be judged harsher. We end up saying yes to doing more work because we're often the only people of color in the organization. It can pile so high to the point where it has a holistic cost on my emotional, physiological, and physical wellbeing. And white folks cannot understand this cost. Yes, I have agency, and yes I'm learning to make different decisions, but the cost is real, and you are part of that cost. I don't want you to feel sorry for me, but you need to do something different in your very being in order to change who we are as an organization and how we function because I'm human.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

So later on I go on to say, many interviewees gave voice to the extra emotional labor required to simply do our jobs at work every day. I say our because this is my experience too. There is the emotional labor of smiling through uncomfortable and offensive interactions, the emotional labor of managing our own biases and the biases of others, the emotional labor of suppressing our counter narratives to be seen as a team player. The emotional labor of downplaying are true thoughts and feelings to avoid being stereotyped as angry or difficult. There is also the emotional and psychological toll of having to work out the sadness, anger, frustration, and disrespect we feel on an ongoing basis while trying to maintain perfect composure on the outside. This is of course on top of doing the job we are paid to do. What would it take to create environments where people of color can do their best work without the ongoing distraction and burden of racism and white supremacy culture?

Amena Brown:

I just feel my feelings. I feel my feelings because one of the other things I loved about the book, Bethaney, that I think is a part of actually doing this work, actually doing the work of seeing that eventually there is no diversity gap is it requires imagination, it requires reimagining how we work. I think when we think about diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, when we think about that work especially if we haven't been participating in it, we're thinking about it in, is it about the numbers? Is it about the number of people that fit these slots that I have? Is it about this strategy that I can write down somewhere or put in a caption on social media? But there is creativity to this as well because we get a chance to reimagine.

Amena Brown:

I love that thought, it's a powerful thing to think about what would this place be like if there were not racism or white supremacy. And maybe in this lifetime or in another however many lifetimes, maybe there will never be a world exactly 0% that. But the fact that we can lead ourselves to imagining that means we get as close as we can. We do that in our lifetime so that the leaders after us can do what they can do in their lifetime. And I love that imagination is a part of this too.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Yes. There are so many questions sprinkle throughout the book that I don't answer because again I do think it's different for everyone. But I do want to evoke that imagination, I do want us to step back and think, what does this mean for us? Yes, maybe it means starting a DEI task force. Those can be helpful, research shows. But maybe it's about how you plan your team outings and who's invited to those. And is it affordable? Is it the sort of activity that one cultural group prefers over another? Everybody's not trying to go hiking, everybody's not trying to go bowling, everybody doesn't drink beer. Some people don't have that flexibility in their schedules because they're taking care of kids, whatever it might be. So some of it is through those formal diversity, equity, inclusion channels. But I find that a lot of it is all the other stuff.

Amena Brown:

I'll tell you something that I've been dreaming about. This is connected, but it's a little bit of a random thought. I still want to share it with you and get your thoughts on it. I was telling someone recently, If I ever have a company where I have multiple employees, I was like, I would love to have Black Women Days that are only for Black women employees. But it's not a sick day, and it's not your PTO, it's a separate bank of days. And that you could call in sometimes and just be like I need a Black Woman Day.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Wow, that stretches my imagination Amena. I'm like, okay, I love this. There's no HR, so you can do that.

Amena Brown:

I mean, Black women need a day, a week, we need our time. And I wish I had that but I could dull it out in some way. I thought about that recently, I was just reimagining things because I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were talking about all the things that Black women carry in our workspace, in our personal lives. It was a funny but real thought that I was like-

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Oh, I love it.

Amena Brown:

Can we get a Black Woman Day?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

There you go.

Amena Brown:

Because at first I was like, "It could be like Juneteenth." And I was like, "No, no, no, no. It needs to be at my choice, at the choice of the Black woman when she can take the day.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I think that's a great idea. I've seen organizations set aside intentional funds to send their employees who are having a minority experience, a variety of identities, they get to go be a part of communities that support them and it's paid for by the organization or the company. I don't think that's a stretch, I think that's beautiful.

Amena Brown:

We're going to work on this, this is how we're going to work on the diversity gap as well. I want to ask some advice questions. And some of these you are covering here in the book. I know some of your answers will be here in this book that you too can have yourself. Let's start with this, if a woman of color is being interviewed for a job and in the interview process, in a typical average interview process you're going to possibly have multiple interviews with different leaders in the company. You may actually tour the facility at some point and see what the lay of the land is like, which means you make it a view on the other people who work there. What are some things as a woman of color that you would tell another woman of color here's some things you should think about when you're considering going into work for a company?

Amena Brown:

Because I have had some moments where there were a lot of things I didn't consider. And then I got hired or got asked to be a contractor, so in a way I wasn't full-time there, but it was still a place I worked pretty consistently. And then I got in there and was like, "No, I can't." So now when I talk with other women of color, and for the women of color who may be watching or listening now having some tools, what are a couple of those tools you would say if you're considering working for a company and you want to know is this the place for you as a woman of color, what are those couple of things you would say think about this?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

The first thing that comes to mind is to assess how much you have to code switch to go to the interview. And so if you are feeling the need to tone down the color of your nails or how you style your hair or what you would naturally wear to the workplace. I'm not saying that's a deal breaker, I'm just saying be mindful of how you are already sensing you need to show up to this space because that's data for you. Of course when you get there, I would say try to who else is here? Is there anyone else who looks like me in this space? Is there anyone that looks like me in this space? And what might that mean? Because if you are the first or one of the few, that will have an extra toll, an extra layer of work added if you aren't mindful of it. People just put expectations on you that you might not even put on yourself.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

So that's something they pay attention to. I would also say pay attention to whether or not they are treating you like you're exceptional. And this is a tricky one because it feels good to be exceptional and remarkable, especially when you are trying to get a job. Yes, that makes sense, it's important you want to stand out. But I have found in situations where people have been like, "Oh, we're trying to diversify, and we need you. We need your voice, we need your perspective." I get it. And on the level, I appreciate it. But it also might mean that they're expecting me to perform especially as the diversity person in ways that I actually don't want to. Maybe I just want to show up and do my marketing or maybe I don't want to be tasked with leading all the diversity, equity, and inclusion things or responding in the middle of a racial crisis. Just be mindful of how that's shaping you, how that is sitting in your body when you are in those conversations.

Amena Brown:

Let me ask you about this as a second advice question. And I feel tender asking it because I remember having been in many situations like this. I want to get your advice on what women of color should do or how they know when it's time to leave a place. And I have worked quite a few places that I maybe should have left sooner. It took some girlfriends, it took some therapy to be like, "You know you can leave there." And I do want to say as a caveat, and you and I have talked about this, it's not everyone's position to have the privilege to leave. That there will be some people that will be working in an environment that is very toxic, that will be working in an environment where the diversity gap is wide, and nothing is being done about that, and they may not have the privilege to leave.

Amena Brown:

And so I want to speak to that first that there may be people watching us right now who are like, "I'm not going to have that privilege, I've got to stay." And maybe we'll address that in a little bit too, but I want to speak to it so we can honor that. For the people, and we're asking this particularly about women of color, for the women of color who would have the possibility to leave, how do you know when it's time? What are two or three things that you should maybe notice, could be in yourself, could be in the organization that would say you might want to consider that this is no longer the place for you?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

So many things come to mind. Honestly, I am the person who tends to stay too long. And so it's like the flags are glaring and red and bright because I've pushed past my actual limits typically. Some of those signs are often in my body, so it's not always rational. It's health things, it's anxiety, it's inability to sleep. Those just general health and wellness factors tend to go awry or that's what I've observed in my own experience. But before it gets to that point if your body hasn't told you yet, I think ... I'm a big fan of intuition in general. As a woman of color, you have an intuition about things. Sometimes it's work for some of us to learn to trust it or to even listen to that intuition. But you can sense things about people or situations that might be data for you if you think it might be time to go.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

If you've been in a position where have gone through all the channels you can to raise issues or problems, especially if they're diversity, equity, inclusion related and it's been months or years and no one's acted on those. It's Maya Angelou quote I believe when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. That would've saved me lots of trouble. Watching how other women of color are experiencing that environment, are they staying, are they leaving? When they leave, is it an emotional dramatic uproar? Is it something that the organization quietly tucks under the rug to be curious about those stories? Because I think oftentimes if you're, especially if you're one of the few Black people who's there or woman of color who's there, there have probably been others. And so curiosity about that can help inform whether or not it's time to stay or time to go.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

But I'm a big believer that your body tells the truth and your body knows. It's like the quiet nudges that you feel after an interaction with a supervisor or big things, bigger health problems that show up in your life. I think your body will tell you honestly.

Amena Brown:

Oh, that's so good. And I didn't plan to ask you this, but I would love to have you speak to it. For the people who may be in that in between, that they're in a job at a company in an organization that they would love to leave but they can't, are there things you would say particularly to women of color? This can apply also to people who are just from other marginalized groups as well when you're in that in between of this is where I am, this is what I got to do to pay my bills right now to take care of myself. But how do you navigate that while you're in an environment that is not the healthiest for you?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

First thing is to pull back from the DEI work in that workplace if you're on that committee because you're one of the few and you're trying to change the world. I think divesting from the organization's DEI work is important for your mental health, especially if they're not trying to actually change anything for real, they just want it on their website to stamp it off. So that's one thing. I would also say or encourage you to evaluate what other boundaries you have with work. Are you overperforming? Are you working harder than the white folks on your team? And if so, how much harder? Is everyone losing sleep or is it just you? Is everyone staying late or is it just ... I think as people of color we can and we often have been trained to or taught to for survival oftentimes to overwork. And I think we have to do some healing work around that to reign that in to make it more manageable.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

Are you picking up someone else's slack? Just to be mindful of those dynamics. And some of this I'm saying it, but truth be told I've needed a community to work through some of these things. It's not just me and my journal sorting through the stuff in my mind, it's me with a spiritual director, with a coach, with a therapist, with Amena and friends helping me piece this together. But think about that, where can you pull back and still be doing your job? And then also you have to prioritize. I think in as much as you have the resources, you have to prioritize filling your life with other life giving things. And so what are you doing before you get to the office? How are you living after you leave the office? What can you be doing to cultivate a rich life outside of your job to help sustain you, to help heal you, to help inspire you as you bridge into what's next?

Amena Brown:

This leads well into the next question I wanted to ask you, which is how do you care for yourself as a Black woman leader? And I want it to be very specific what I mean because I know that the term self care for example has a lot of definition, everybody has a lot of definitions how they think about that. I think a lot of that definition falls into pampering for some folks. And one should pamper oneself as much as one wants to pamper oneself. But I think there is also a very holistic view of what it means to care for yourself. And could that be bath bombs? It could. Could it be saying no to opportunities that you don't think are a good fit for you? It could be that. Could it be drawing boundaries in unhealthy relationships? It could be that.

Amena Brown:

What are those things that are how you care for yourself as a Black woman leader, and in particular as a Black woman leader who has been in this space of talking about racial justice, of talking about diversity, equity, inclusion? I feel like all Black women need a layer of how we care for ourselves. There are additional layers when you do this work required for the diversity gap. Talk to us about that.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I love this question. For me, it looks like creating a life I love outside of this work. And that largely in involves a homestead that I'm cultivating with my husband. Before The Diversity Gap, I knew that I wanted to eventually retreat to some farm place in the middle of nowhere. And I don't think I always knew why I felt that pull. Part of it is because I grew up on a farm. But I think inside my body's wisdom knew that if I was going to show up to this really painful work related to race and justice, then I would need an anchor that was inherently nourishing to me. And so we recently purchased an acre of land, and we have been building a house, it's almost done.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

It's just this beautiful acre in middle Georgia, you won't be able to find me. And the internet barely works unless you have great service, which I do, but I can turn it off. For Bethaney, self-care looks like having a home base that does not care how many emails I send, doesn't how many downloads my podcast gets, it doesn't matter. The chickens need you to go collect their eggs. The farm, the home, it needs maintenance, and it doesn't care about the things that are happening online on the screen. And I needed that, I needed a completely different universe that I can live in and cultivate. And so that has been the biggest thing for me.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I would say secondly has been deepening into community with other Black women who are healing. I don't even know if I have words to describe just how unbelievably restorative that has been for every part of my life. It's just been everything when you can show up to this space, you don't have to explain a thing, don't have to perform, you don't have to be magical, don't have to be wonder woman, you can just be. And that has been everything for me.

Amena Brown:

I resonate with that because you're a part of that community with me. And for so long having been the lone Black woman in certain spaces, the lone woman in certain spaces sometimes I didn't have that community with other Black women. And the last five years of life building that has been so life giving even when I was still working in a lot of spaces where I was one of a small number of Black women there or the only Black women there, it was like I still felt like even though I look around and I don't see Black women here in my life, I felt like I had a squad of that support. And that is such a big part of that care. I'm so glad that you have been a part of that for me, that we got to do some of that together has been so wonderful.

Amena Brown:

Let's talk about what is next for Bethaney B. Wilkinson. And I want to qualify what I mean when I ask this because you and I have gone to a lot of conferences, a lot of professional conferences together. You get in the green room or in whatever the little networking thing is. And that was always the big question, well, what's next? What do you have going on? What's next, what's going on? What are you doing? What are you up to? And for so many years, I just felt so obligated to have some amazing thing to say that I was going to do. And so I want you to know that I'm not asking from that lens, this is not a productivity question. This is done, what's the next thing you're going to be doing Bethaney?

Amena Brown:

This is not a productivity question, it's more of a soul question. What is this season of life now versus what the season of life was that you may have been in when you were working on your book? I think that's the weird thing about writing books too is you're in a certain season of life when you pitch the idea, and then you're in a totally different season of life when you actually write it. And then you're in a totally different season of life when it actually is out there for other people to read. So tell us what is next for you, what are you dreaming up right now? What is bringing you joy?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

What's next? So I mentioned the homestead, that's going to be a lot of what's next as our house is finished. And I'm really open handed about what all that means. It's a new town for me, I want to know my people in a place. And I'm hoping that the pandemic ends one day and so I'll be able to go out and build relationships in my town, so that's a big thing for me. I'm really wanting to enter a season of rest. And I do rest, I'm not going to lie, I'm grateful that I've been able to design a life where I take a lot of breaks. Maybe too many some would say, truth be told.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

But I'm excited to have an extended season of focusing on just being in one space and cultivating nourishment and even sanctuary is a word I've been sitting with. What would it look like to have a safe and healing place for Bethaney as a Black woman? And then beyond that, I'm dreaming about what it would look like to create those sorts of spaces for other Black women in general where we can be with each other, commune with the land. I know I sound like a hippie because I kind of am, which might be surprising because I wrote this book on organizational culture and leadership, but this is just the truth of who I am.

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I'm really dreaming about space and place and land and community, and what does it mean to be a part of that? And how can I invite more people into that? For our healing as people, I think reading or writing this book and reading about race a lot in general, I'm like, "Okay, we've got the problem." My book or all the other books, we have a pretty good working understanding of the problem. And now I want to focus my energy on being a part of creating those environments where we can experience healing just for the sake of our own lives and stories not for the sake of transforming organizations.

Amena Brown:

Right, right. I love what's next, that sounds amazing. Do you have any final words that you want to share with the people, the community of folks that are watching or listening? What's in your mind right now when you think about closing this time of us getting to celebrate that you did this, you sat down, you wrote a book that's going to be very helpful for so many people? And it wasn't easy, and you wrote it during a time that had a lot of layers of being difficult. So we're celebrating that, we're celebrating you, we're encouraging people to dig into this work. What are your final words you'd say to the community?

Bethaney B. Wilkinson:

I would say that the journey is the work. And yes, there is a destination that I dream about, that place where the diversity gap is closed. But as I reflect on my own experience of writing this book and all of the lessons I've learned as a human in relationships, in leadership, in organizational life, it's all the work. And it's just the daily choice to say yes to it, the willingness to see our racial dynamics, the willingness to see other people, the willingness to ask the hard questions. And that's what the work is. And it's a lifelong journey, but it's also beautiful, and you learn a ton. So my encouragement would be to opt in, opt into the work. And it looks different for all of us, that's what's tricky about it. It's easy to stand outside and say this is what it should look like for you or for you, post this thing or go to this thing. But really deepening into our own stories and knowing that the journey is the work is what I want to encourage people to do.

Amena Brown:

Big, big thank you to Bethaney B. Wilkinson for being a part of the HER living room this week. And big thank you to you for being a part of the HER living room. Bethaney's book that The Diversity Gap: Where Good Intentions Meet True Cultural Change is out now. These are my out now fingers. You can't see them, but they're happening. You can get a copy wherever books are sold but be cool and get Bethaney's book from your favorite independent bookseller. For more info about Bethaney and her book, visit thediversitygap.com. HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 51

Amena Brown:

Hey everybody. In this week's episode from the HER Archives and from the Before Times, I'm talking with podcaster and education advocate Dr. Alma Zaragoza-Petty. Dr. Alma shares with us how she overcame obstacles on her path to education. Listen in as Dr. Zaragoza-Petty shares the barriers first generation students encounter on their path to higher education and why it's important for marginalized people to pursue higher education. Let's take a listen.

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody, listeners. Oh my gosh. Welcome back. We are in the middle of such a fantastic season two and I'm so excited to have our next guest. Our theme for this episode is finding a path to higher education, so I want to welcome L.A. native, Dr. Alma L. Zaragoza-Petty. You all, I'm just so excited about it, listen. So just so you all know, Alma does all the things, but specifically she works in L.A. as a first generation student retention specialist in higher education. She is also the cohost of The Red Couch Podcast, which... I love this description. A brown eyed social and political commentary with a hood twist. Yes, I'm here for it. Welcome Dr. Alma to the podcast. This is me clapping because no one's here.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Hey. Thank you.

Amena Brown:

No one else is here to clap, Alma. So, I'm just...

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

We will clap for ourselves.

Amena Brown:

That's right. That's right. We deserve these claps. So let me tell you how I first heard about you, Alma, which was many years before we ever met, and technically we've never met in person still, I don't think.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

No, we haven't. We've had conversation about the fund.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

We both planned a conference, but never in person.

Amena Brown:

We've done all the things, except see each other in person. But I first heard about you from your husband, whose government name is Jason, but I didn't know that until I had known him for five years. We were on an email training, and people were like, "And then Jason is going to announce." Like, "Who are they talking about?" I was like, "Oh, Propaganda, that's his government name." So normally, in the faith based space, spoken word poets don't get booked at the same things, typically. It's like they just book us one at a time, I don't know why. Except Prop and I would get booked for the same events, for many years we would. And so I was sitting down in the green room, I'm talking to him and he was just going on and on about how brilliant you were, and all these things that you knew, and what you were studying and what you teach people.

Amena Brown:

And when people are married, it's hard because you're not sure if they think their person is brilliant because they live with them and be in the bed with them and stuff. So you just smile and like, "Oh, that's so good."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

[crosstalk 00:03:03] Struggles or you get that special...

Amena Brown:

Really? I was just like, "Oh, that's really nice he thinks that of her." And then when I talked to you and knew more about you, I was like, "Oh, no. He was actually very accurate, super accurate." So shout out to Prop for just giving me all the brilliant information, because he was very correct. Because sometimes people be married and they be like, "Oh, my husband. He sings so well." And then you're like, "No."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Oh, no. That's the worst.

Amena Brown:

Really.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I always feel I won't live up to his descriptions of me though, because he is just my number one fan. He's just an amazing supporter of mine, and it's just really cool whenever people tell me that. I'm just like, "Man, I really hope I don't disappoint you now, because he talks me up so big."

Amena Brown:

And listeners, if you're not familiar, Dr. Alma is married to Propaganda, who's a fantastic poet and MC and thought leader, so you want to know about that. But we're talking to Dr. Alma today, so we gonna talk to her and you can do the research on those things or on their podcast. So I have to tell Alma that I have a cousin who is also named Alma, okay. But all my people are from North Carolina, so when I was growing up, I knew her name to be Amma.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Is there no L in there?

Amena Brown:

No, the L... We don't know where the L went, the L been gone. So all these years, I thought her name A-M-M-A, Amma. That's seems like that would make perfect sense. And there was something that I had to invite her to, that my grandma spelled her name out for me, and I was like, "Who is Alma?" She was like, "That's your cousin, Amma." No it's not, no it's not. Where... How Amma come from Alma, those are two... How that work out? So I still don't know where the L is, but I guess that happens in North Carolina. Just consonants walk out, we don't know where they go.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Yeah. I love it. Yes, every person that I've met that has any... Knows anyone with my name, is usually a older Black woman named Alma as well. I guess. No seriously. I don't know why this is a thing. Or they're legit just Latina, other Latinas. So those are the two populations that apparently... Alma is an old school name that a lot of older Black women have and then people went to start calling me Aunt Alma, because they probably have only heard those term... My name-

Amena Brown:

Yes.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I'm like...

Amena Brown:

Well, if there's ever an army of Almas, I know now... I know what they're going to look like, it's going to be some amazing Latinas and this generation of older black women. They'll all band together, I can't wait.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

So I'm so excited that you're on the podcast, because first of all, because I just think you're awesome and amazing. So basically a part of having a podcast as you know, is begging people that you think are awesome and be like, "Hey, would you spend some time with me, telling me all the things?" But I also just love what you're doing in your work that you, yourself pursued higher education. You're also helping encourage other students and in particular, students of color and in particular, first generation students how to pursue higher education. So I always like to start with an origin story. So I want to ask you, what was the moment that you knew you wanted to pursue higher education? And I'll use a story of my own as an example. So my mom was a nurse when I was growing up, and she introduced me to a pediatrician, I was nine years old. And she was a graduate, her name was Dr. Stephanie and she was a graduate of Spelman College, right.

Amena Brown:

And my mom said she walked me in, introduced me to her, left me in the office talking to her for a few minutes. And she said I just wouldn't stop talking about going to Spelman after that. And that was my one moment of meeting this woman and being like, "Oh, something about her, I like." Something about...I couldn't tell you what we talked about, but I certainly went to Spelman, all those years later, right. And I think that's interesting even just the exposure we have to other people and other experiences that makes us dream for our life differently than we may have. So was it a moment that you had? Or a time in your life that you were like, "I'm going for this, I'm going to do it."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Well, first I want to back up and say that I also admire you. You gave me an awesome introduction, but I actually have seen your poetry now via video at the last conference that the Jefferson Institute put on here in L.A. And I was just blown away, so you are equally amazing and thank you for inviting me. It's my honor to be here as well and I'm excited for even that invitation, so thank you. And then just to answer, I guess more to the point, I think for me it wasn't the big moment, it more a series of events. So I remember growing up, and my parents were actually... They worked in what I now know was a sweat shop, it was a actual Korean owned textile sweat shop, where they made clothes. And my mom was a seamstress, so she would sew. And then my dad, my stepdad who raised me since I was eleven, he would iron. That was his job, he would iron the clothes before they would get sent out to these fancy stores, right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I spent every summer basically at my mom's job, because... I mean we are getting too much into my convoluted grow up story. But basically I was raised apart from my siblings because we were all brought back from Mexico, like one at a time, because my parents couldn't afford us all at once here. So I was the first one brought back, so I had to spend three summers just chilling in my mom's sweat shop where she worked, and just seeing these women and men just work so hard everyday, it was just like, "Oh, my gosh. They work so hard. How can I not do this when I grow up? I don't want to be on my last cent." It was inspiring because they had such a hard work ethic, but at the same time it was scary to think, "Am I going to spend my life like that? I don't know that I want to do that."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I think a lot of that came from my dad. My dad would tell me, "Hey, I don't want you to grow up and do this kind of job. It's hard, it's really intense. It's physically draining and you're just tired." And he wanted more for us, he would always say, "You need to work hard so that you don't end up like me." That was literally his message to me, right. So a lot of it was coupled with that and my own ideas of how I didn't want to do that. But because we grew up at... As myself, first generation here in the US, so both my parents are immigrants from Mexico. And because I was the first one here, I didn't have a lot of examples of what else can I be. It was a lot of trial and error, growing up.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

So a lot of it was teachers believing in me before I even realized, "Oh, yeah. I should do that." One specific example was my math teacher, my senior year in high school. I had graduated with honors and I had been, for the most part, taking a lot of advanced courses, but for some reason, I was never tracked in to college because my ninth grade was spent ditching with my ex boyfriend, you know. So I actually had straight Ds my whole ninth grade, but I was always academic, but that year I happened to really f up and no one tracked me to go to college. They were all like, "Oh, this girl." So I literally was... Even though I graduated with honors, had never been told about applying for college or doing... Making sure I was doing all of that. So it just took that teacher telling me, "Hey, so what are your plans after high school?" And I was like, "Oh, I've already signed up for the Army."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

One of my friends had decided she was going to join the Army, and so I was like, "Okay, that sounds good. I'll do that." I had no idea what I wanted to do, and so I was pretty lost at that time. I was just like, "No, I don't want to do this, but..." Anything sounded better than that, at that point. So I was like, "Yeah, the Army. That sounds like a great idea." So I signed up, and that specific teacher, who's also actually a Latino. A teacher that I had in high school told me... I just love the way that he turned the phrase on its head and was like, "Why do you want to go somewhere..." Because you know their slogan is, "Be all that you can be." How are you going to be really all that you can be when you're being told what to be?

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I was just like, "Huh?" It just totally... And not that I have any... Obviously there's a lot of people that serve in the Army, I'm grateful for their service and sacrifice. But it was definitely not something I wanted to do, it was just that there was such an active recruitment of people like me in my high school to go to the Army forces. And that was my only viable way of thinking I can get to college, which was my actual dream to do. At that point I was like, "No, I want to go to college, and this is one way that I can do it." So yeah, it was that. It wasn't a counselor telling me to apply to financial aid, even though I was not sure what I was going to do after high school. She just made everybody sign up.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And was like, "Okay, even if you think you're not, just do it. Because what if you change your mind?" And I was definitely one of those. Yeah, it was that, it was people seeing the potential in me and helping me think deeper about what I really wanted to do. And it opened up a whole other world to me that I didn't even know existed.

Amena Brown:

So you went into undergrad. What did you decide was going to be your major in undergrad?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

In undergrad, I quickly learned that I really liked working with people. Specifically on a one on one level, that's just my really good space, where I really feel alive and just... I love it, and so I thought, "I'm going to be a psychologist," that was my first flag, until I was little. I need a major in psychology to do that, so that's how I decided to major in psychology. I didn't know at the time that UCLA, which is where I got my undergraduate degree from, I didn't know at the time that it was actually very biological there. So it was very much cognitive psychology, which was not as fun. I did not enjoy that. So I ended up adding English literature as a minor, because it just kept me feeling alive during that time where I had to learn about all these synapses and things. I was like, "Oh, I don't really care about this, guys." Yeah.

Amena Brown:

And then, from there went into your masters. So what did you decide from there, after leaving undergrad? I feel like a lot of people get towards that in time of undergrad and are like, "Should I go get a masters? Should I not?" So how did that extension happen for you? And then, did you decide you wanted to still study similarly? Or how did your studies change or stay the same when you went into your masters?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

So because I didn't really have a lot of people around me guiding that process of higher education, that knew what it took, I actually went the most of long of round ways to get a PhD. So I have actually... I mastered in counseling that I got before my PhD, and then during my PhD program, I also got a masters in education, because I didn't know you could do that. So if I would've known before, I would have just gone straight to my PhD and gotten a PhD. But I was also real hard headed when I was young, so I'm sure some people probably tried to tell me and I was just like, "No, I'm doing this on my own."

Amena Brown:

Right. Story of our twenties, definitely. Like, "Oh, that's what you're saying? No, I'm not doing that."

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I ended up deciding that I wasn't sure if I wanted to work with college students, because I had already been working with college students at that time. I had been working from when I was in my own college experience, East Los Angeles community college. I started out at community college. I started working in the admissions' office really quickly and realizing like, "Wow, there's not a lot of people like me here already," and I'm just starting community college and just feeling like I wanted to do something about that. But I also have a really big heart for children, younger population. At that time I was like... So I was really conflicted, so I took a year off after UCLA to try actually working with children and see how I liked it. So the fact that I'm working with college students and Latino, I didn't like it.

Amena Brown:

Didn't work out.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Didn't work out. I mean, I also doom myself in the most extreme way of helping... Or working with that population, I worked at a group home for a year. Yeah, in a residence where, basically students or kids go once they've aged out or have... No one wants them, and I say that in terms of their family. They've been in the system for too long and just no one is picking them up, because no around that is going to... And it's also... Was one where a lot of the kids there were heavily medicated, they just had a lot of issues that really at times, created unsafe environments for themselves and others. So they had to sedate them often, and it was just intense, girl. I was in there, I was like, "What is this?"

Amena Brown:

Why?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

It was just too much for me. I would just go home and nap the sadness away and just try to get up the next day and go back at it. But it was a blur, that year, it just was intensely emotional, draining just everything. And I was just like, "Yeah, I don't think I'm cut out for this." It was just too much on me, and so I decided, "I think I should stick to working with that population that I've been interested in," which is college age students. And I ended up applying to counseling programs because my goal was to become an advisor at a university or a college where I would help students get to the next step on their own in their own academic life.

Amena Brown:

I mean, shout out to you trying this out though, because I...First of all, I also love college students. Before I was a full time artist, I worked in a local church capacity, working with college students and I still... When I get invited to a college, it's still one of the most... One of my favorite places to be, maybe because it was just such a time of formation for me, in so many ways. What I wanted to do with my life, what I thought about God, what I thought about love and friendship and all these things in such a short amount of time in your life. So I love students.

Amena Brown:

But one of the things I love to tell them is, "Hey, you're a college student, try something. If you think you want to do it, hey, go try it and see, then you'll know." So it's like you got a chance to try that, albeit in a really tough space and environment, but then you knew. Like, "Whoa, I did that. That's not my jam." Let me go to something that is more my jam than this.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Right.

Amena Brown:

Can you talk about... First of all, we know that we need more women of color. As many marginalized people as possible in the field of higher education, because a lot of... I only have my bachelors in... My degree from the school of hard knocks, but my other friends who have pursued higher education, particularly those who were women of color or people of color, they would talk about how the higher of a degree they got, the less they saw people there that looks like them.

Amena Brown:

Or the less they were being taught by people who looked like them. What are the barriers for, particularly, first generation students pursuing higher education? What are the... In your work, what are the obstacles that first generation students are coming up against that may prevent from of them, or make it even more challenging for them to pursue higher education.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I mean, I think it'd be a lie if we don't start off with the fact that finances are big component if you're a first generation student. You don't have the capital to think about how you're going to pay for it, and so that is already off the bat, working against you. Because you're like, "Man, how am I even going to be able to pay for this? I don't want to be in debt my whole life, taking out loans." In California anyway, I'm not sure how it works in other states, but I know a lot of California policy and the context here. And I know that here, students whose parents make a certain level of income, will get grant. So they get totally paid for, for them, right. So that's one quick way that they're able to now envision like, "Okay, I can do this." One of the reasons I went to UCLA was actually... It was not my top choice, my top choice was Berkeley. And I actually got accepted to Berkeley, but their financial package was non-existent. So I was like, "Bye, Berkeley. I'm totally going to UCLA."

Amena Brown:

You know that's right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

They offered me a full ride. They paid for my studies.

Amena Brown:

Wow.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I think part of it is this initiative, also in California, where they want to keep locals, they have to basically grant some scholarships for those in the local community. And a lot of universities do this throughout the United States, where they want to invest in the local community, to get degrees and... So they off set costs for students like me, who aren't able to pay, through scholarships. Then obviously the grants also kicked in. So basically it was a gap scholarship, whatever the grant didn't cover, they would. So I think, that for sure, and finding ways to help students. Even just demystify all that and know that there is some support there, and that there's different ways to get scholarships and all that, it's always important. I feel pretty sure recent students... And I would say, if I had to name one other thing, it's definitely the different ways that mental health shows up for students, for people.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I know that I went through all of college just searching... Trying out a lot of stuff. I definitely was wilding out, doing all of the things. And a lot of that was out of my own trauma, unidentified trauma from my... Just growing up in a very low resource community, there isn't access to stuff like dental. I remember in grad school, finally taking advantage of all the dental insurance that we had, because I was like, "Oh yeah, I haven't gone since I was... Since I stopped getting Medi-Cal when I was eighteen years old. I should probably go now."

Amena Brown:

Right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Because that's real. A lot of my students that I work with, those are the kinds of things that they're up against. They're just not realizing... Or just having to deal with basically, the consequences of their parents having to sacrifice, coming to a whole other country and what that does to you on an emotional level. Where you're not very present sometimes with kids and because you're just trying to survive out here. But it also means that a lot of students grow up not really knowing how to emotionally... Even traverse all of the requirements and scheduling your classes and study time, and all these little things that a lot of other who are not first generation are coming in with the skills. They already have folks that have talked to them about this, even through high school. I would say, mental health in the way that it just shows up differently for people in our first gen people of color. The trauma of realizing you are the only Latina sitting at the table in many instances, and what that does to you psychologically.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Even when you're not tokenized, you're just like, "There's no one else here. If I speak, will they think this is a Latino voice speaking?"

Amena Brown:

Right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Yeah. I would say that's definitely another huge barrier, just of different ways that... That imposter syndrome kicks in when we are in those spaces. And learning how to find your voice through that or how to be quiet sometimes, and just be like, "Lord, just get me through this."

Amena Brown:

Right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I will do all the therapy when I'm done.

Amena Brown:

Right. And it happened to be like, "It is not my job to speak for all these things. I can come here and be a student, you all can figure out your racism, reading The New Jim Crow. I don't need to also be a student and consult you on your white supremacy. That I can do my stuff I'm doing and let you do your work over there." Which is so powerful to me. I was not expecting you to bring up mental health as a barrier, and that is so powerful, because I think... I know from my experience, being a Black woman, even in undergrad... And I went to an all Black, all female college, right. I think even the idea that maybe is in some of us that grew up coming from marginalized contexts, this idea that you've got into college, you don't have permission to be depressed. You don't have permission to now be dealing with trauma or that PTSD might be popping up in these ways, and you didn't expect or know to call it PTSD, or know that that was a panic attack.

Amena Brown:

And just for students now, younger than us, to have the permission of, you don't have to carry your whole neighborhood and your family line and all these things, that you also are a person, that your feelings and thoughts and your struggles, that they matter. That's so powerful, that you brought that up.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Yeah. I mean, I've seen it so much with my students, even now, where they have a lot of... Because of... I mean, I blame the media and the way that we don't represent our voices in any different kinds of stream and... Mainstream art and that kind of thing, where they have these ideas of themselves as being less than. Putting up just mental barriers like, "Oh, yeah. I really suck at this." Not having that mindset of, "No, this is challenging and you need to do these things to overcome it." It's almost this mentality of... And I don't want to pathol... Make it a pathology of the poor or first generation students, because I feel like this happens in the culture at large to the other population. But just the talking of... Having them here, basically repeating back to them what they're saying and how that's not how everyone thinks of themselves, it's actually depression. If you think you are this, this and that. Having students for example, share stuff like they just really suck and add something, and they can't believe that they failed this one thing and that just means they're a failure.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And creating this whole story about how much that means that they don't belong in college now. And I'm just like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's back up three different steps, because you are doing... You're jumping to this conclusion that you convinced yourself of, that is not real. You are being challenged as you should in college, in a hard topic that you've heard of, that maybe you weren't prepared for in the schools you come from because of just the lower resources that are even there. That's who are the problem, but here are some steps you need to take to make sure that you do well," like tutoring, creating study groups, all these thing that we can rephrase in the ways that we think about our own learning and what we're capable of or not capable of.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Why would you say it's important for marginalized people to pursue higher education?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I mean, I think it's probably the reasons you brought up earlier, which is, there's not enough of us in the academy and that's problematic. We have so much contextual and experiential knowledge to bring to the table, and systems are not going to change unless we are at the table and suggesting different things. Because clearly, what is being suggested isn't working right now, because it continues to be an issue, right. So the reason why we even feel imposter syndrome is because we see all of our professors and they're all white males or non people of color often. It's hard, I remember when I was teaching at Chapman, I had a few students who was like, "You are my only Latina professor I've ever seen, heard of." Then you realize that was a thing, almost like they were very shocked and the fact that I even had some of them for two classes, they were like, "Oh my gosh, I have a Latina professor for two classes. This is probably the most diverse it's going to get when I'm in college," in terms of who's teaching.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I think Latinas are the most under represented in higher education in the professor level. Well, it's just the history of it. We just haven't been here the... We have been here a long time when Mexico was part of the US, but we just haven't had the opportunities to actually be here, right. Actually go through the systems up higher and that. Because they weren't created for us.

Amena Brown:

Right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

In the past we've had to fight our way into the academy to begin with, and now we're seeing more opportunities for that and people stepping up to that and going through the process of, just all of the higher ed levels that you can go through. Yeah, it's a... There's a lot there, I think it's also to say we should all pursue this and we should all aim for this, because I realize that some people just don't feel like that's a card or whatever. But I would challenge a lot of people to actually to think about... Even when they do have that inkling of like, "I really feel like I should be doing this, but that's going to be so uncomfortable and scary and..." Or not even being aware that that's what they're feeling but just being like, "It's okay, I don't think I want that." Cutting yourself out from the race before you even start, because of all those thoughts about real potential and what can do and cannot do with your life.

Amena Brown:

That's so powerful and I... It makes me... It's inspiring to me, because I'm thinking there are so many... If I think about it in some things that I've had negative connotations coming out of higher education, and some of the things that were written there, a lot of... For example, racist policy, racist ideas and thoughts came out of racist people having access to education and being able to write these academic thoughts and papers, right. And so to me, thinking about what you're saying, and over time that we're going to see more and more people of color, women of color, more marginalized people being represented there. That means, even education will shift, overall, right. The ways that those dissertations and papers and studies are getting written. All those things then shift, which does change society and change culture and in some ways, changes policy, has some influence more...

Amena Brown:

It's huge influence to be just teaching a room full of college students, because you're teaching people that are going to go out into the world and lead in so many ways. And even more than that, people that have access to higher education can really make an impact in some ways. I mean, would you say that's also true?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Definitely. I think that... One of the things that I often talk about is how I didn't become professor, even though that was the trajectory set out for me. I'm part of that... I mean, I'll get into it later. But part of that was also realizing that the academy is still very exclusive or just very... It would've just been basically a constant daily battle to have to justify my existence there, making sure that... And just all that it takes to be in a very oppressive and racist environment. And at the end of the day, I was just like, "I'm good. I don't really need to fight this fight." I know that's the fight to fight, but I just didn't feel called to do that, I didn't feel like I wanted that to be a... And I knew that, knowing myself, it would've been really hard to be quiet sometimes, and you got to be quiet sometimes. And I just knew I would just die to myself a little bit, each time I didn't say something. And it was just too much at that time.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And I was just like, " I don't think I really want this right now." And honestly, I just had a passion for working with first generation students from working class backgrounds, and unfortunately college is not often... If you're teaching a room full of students like that or a room full of students, maybe 10 to 15% of them will be that population. But that's what really brings me life, and I was just like, "I don't know that I want to sacrifice for the rest of these students in here who are going to be fine, with or without me, when I could really be pouring into this specific population of students."

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Which is what I really... I found myself wanting to do.

Amena Brown:

Even in the example you just gave, you were able to use that influence, even passed the classroom. That there are all these different ways that that can work out, which I think is so powerful. I wanted to ask you also, for people who are on the fence about pursuing higher ed, whether that's a masters for them or a PhD. I actually applied for my MFA when I first got out of school, not really out of inspiration purposes, but just like, "Maybe that'll buy me some time to figure out what I'm supposed to do." But this was what? 2002, when I was graduating college, so at that time, spoken word was not welcome in academia. So I sent them all my little spoken word poems and they were like, "No, ma'am. We're trying to see these high coupes, these sonnets, these sestinas. We do not care about your long free verse." Whereas now, there are lots of spoken word poets who get MFAs.

Amena Brown:

But I think many people who get to either... Maybe get to their associates and then they're trying to decide about, do they go further into a bachelors or finish their bachelors. Trying to decide about masters and so on. But think about what ever in their life are the obstacles, whether, like you said, it's money. I know for some of my friends it's been the age they are or maybe the way their family dynamic might be at that point. They might be caring for aging parents, they might have little ones or be working a job and wondering, "How can I work and pursue this dream I have?" What would be the encouragement you would say to people who do have a passion for this, they do want to pursue higher education, they just wonder if they can surpass what may be the challenges or obstacles in front of them. What would you say to them?

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

I mean, I think that there always a way to figure out and find your allies in any space. We've had to do that as women of color specifically, in this country for all of history. So I feel like there's there's always going to be a way for you to create that circle of people who are going to be there for you, supporting you, just encouraging you. And that's really, really important if you're stepping into something that you know is going to require, in lots of ways, challenging, some oppressive systems. And maybe even really using your voice, even during that time to push back a little bit at policies and all that. So definitely setting up a circle of just like minded individuals who are going to support you, who are going to be your cheerleaders and are going to keep you pushing. I think also for me, a big driver was... I think I was always very scared of being in my death bed and being...

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Not to take it super deep and scary, but being like, "I should have really tried that, and I didn't." I don't want to ever say that, I'd rather say, "I tried it and I sucked at it and I failed, but I tried it." And I think that has a lot to do with allowing ourselves to live with fear and the tension of fear, but knowing that God's got our back and we're going to be fine. And we're going to learn from this even if it's not the lesson we want to learn, but we will. Because that's what life is all about, it's always God teaching us those things that we actually needed to learn during this time and not really these academics, knowledgy things. I think, coming out of my PhD program, the biggest lessons I learned were around just my own blocks, mental blocks, mental issues. Just issues that I had rather than content knowledge. I mean, I did have a lot of content knowledge as well, but it was that that I'm carrying with me.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

Even more now, and taking it to the next step in my life. And I think when we stop ourselves from... Especially if you have a really deep desire and you're pretty sure this is not even coming from you anymore, it's like you are supposed to do this, but you're just scared. I mean, there's no other word, you're probably just scared. I think it's just letting go and also realizing like, "Hey, it's going to be scary, it's going to be something that's not going to be predictable. But that's what makes it fun, that's what life's about." And being okay with failure, and I say that as someone who has gone through failure. I know what that's like, I know that it's... On the surface, it might look like I got all these fancy degrees and all these cool stuff, but I've had to go through a lot of failure to get to where I'm at right now. I had to get all them Ds in ninth grade and realize, "I don't think I want this for my life."

Amena Brown:

Right.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And at one point, almost getting kicked out of my PhD program for running my mouth when I shouldn't have. Just things that I learned that was I like, "Wow, I wouldn't have learned this if I wouldn't have pushed myself to my zones of uncomfort." It's really easy sometimes to... I think, to not rock the boat or not change things up. But ultimately, it's your life and you're going to look back at the end of it and you're going to be the one to know really when you tried or when you just took a shortcut, because you didn't want to do that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

And then you rob the next generation of...

Amena Brown:

Come on, you rob the next generation, yes. I hope listen and feel a good pressure.

Alma Zaragoza-Petty:

[crosstalk 00:40:20] Because you didn't want to go through your healing, so...

Amena Brown:

Yes. We hope you feel a weighted blanket sort of pressure to do these things that you're supposed to do with your life. Such good stuff from Dr. Alma Zaragoza-Petty. Make sure you check out Dr. Alma's podcasts, the Red Couch and Prickly Pear Collective. You can find this info and info from previous episodes in the show notes at amenabrown.com/herwithamena. Thanks for listening.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 50

Amena Brown:

Hey everybody. We are back in the living room, talking friendship stuff. I hope this series of these friendship episodes has been great. If you are just joining the podcast, know that there are a few other episodes that you may enjoy listening to. My friend, Celita and I talked about how to survive a friendship breakup. And this is third in a series of me answering questions from you, the listeners, and from folks on social media as well. So for part three, we've got some really great questions. You all ask some really good questions. There were a couple of them that I was like, man, I got to really have a moment to think about this.

Amena Brown:

So let's jump right in here. Question one of our episode today, how do you balance what you want a friendship to be with what the other person wants? I often feel like I want more than the other person and have a hard time with that tension. Great question. I hate to always answer a question with a question although I think I am that person often in my life, so, sorry to my family and friends for that, but I would throw back to you a question to consider, which is, are the things you want in a friendship healthy and reasonable? I have been on the side of a friendship where I felt that my friend had expectations of me that were not reasonable for me to meet. And I felt on the other side, as the friend who maybe wanted different things from the friendship than my friend did, I felt like, oh gosh, that request that they have of me is not reasonable, I don't know if I can do it.

Amena Brown:

And so that's the first thing that you have to consider is what you're asking of your friend reasonable and is what you're asking of your friend healthy? Let's talk about things that are healthy and reasonable that you want from a friend. These are foundational things, you want respect, you want clear communication, you want someone who is a caring and thoughtful friend, who shows you that they care about you. Those are healthy and reasonable requests. And there are other healthy and reasonable things that could be listed here, but I listed these as just some basics so you have an idea of what I mean. So it's healthy and reasonable to want a friend to be respectful of you, to be respectful of your time and of your space, to be respectful of the boundaries that you set for yourself and your health.

Amena Brown:

It's healthy and reasonable for you to want to have a friend in your life that can communicate with you and let you know, hey, this doesn't work for me or, hey, I can't be there, I can't go to that, I can't do this thing or I can do that and here's what time, and here's what I have available, those things. If what you want in your friendship is healthy and reasonable then if the other person looks at your healthy and reasonable request and they're like, no, I can't be respectful of you. No, I'm not going to clearly communicate and no, I'm not going to be a caring person or thoughtful of you, then at that point, it may be that the friendship will never get to a point of being balanced because the friendship is at that point unhealthy. So that's the first question I think you have to ask yourself.

Amena Brown:

And then if I can take the reverse of that, if you are in a friendship and your wants or needs of the friendship are not healthy or are not reasonable. And I'll give you a couple of examples of that. Expecting time from the friendship or from the friend that they may not be able to give, expecting to be their number one priority at all times, expecting them to accept disrespect or an unreasonable amount of a lack of communication from you. Those are things that are not healthy and not reasonable in a friendship. So I think you have to think about, is what you want in the friendship healthy and reasonable? And if so, then you can see if the friend that you've referenced here is willing to meet your healthy and reasonable requests. And if they aren't, then you may be discovering this isn't a great person to have in your life as a friend, that there will never be balanced in the friendship because the friendship is an unhealthy one that isn't good for you to have in your life.

Amena Brown:

And if you are thinking through this and you are discovering, I may have some unreasonable or unhealthy requests of my friend, I may be wanting to, I'm just using this as a random example, but I may be wanting to meet with my friend every week at this time for this activity. And their schedule may not be able to keep up with that, or they may not want to do that every week at this time and this way. And so it is not reasonable for me to want that from them or have that expectation of them. So if you have some wants or needs in the friendship that are not healthy and not reasonable, think about some ways that you can work on yourself and how you can get to a place where, what you do want from a friendship is healthy and is reasonable. And special shout out to therapy here, because there are many reasons why people go to therapy or what becomes the catalyst for sending someone to therapy or counseling, whatever type of professional support that you may have access to.

Amena Brown:

And sometimes we think, well, obviously it would be our parents that would send us to therapy or our family of origin, those are the people that will send us to therapy and of course, maybe sometimes they do. And then we might think it's our romantic relationships that will send us to therapy, and sometimes they do, but sometimes we can go into therapy and talk about our friendships and how we are interacting there. And there are times in our lives that how we interact with our friends can show us a lot about where we might find ourselves in a healthy place or in an unhealthy place. So that would be my answer there. Ask yourself some good questions and if you find that you have unhealthy and unreasonable requests of your friends, or if you find that you have a lot of friends around you that continually have unhealthy and unreasonable expectations of you, you may need additional support and therapy, and counseling can be a great place to get that support. So shout out to therapy.

Amena Brown:

Okay. Question six. I have a friend and I'm not sure if they hold my honest perspectives and experiences as a Black person, what should I do? Oh my. So this makes me think of a funny story first that is relevant to this question. So my grandma, some of you that have been listening to the podcast for awhile or have followed my work for awhile, know that my grandma is such a big inspiration to me. And she's also just everything that a Black woman in her eighties should be. She's just very honest and going to tell you how it is, is. And so my grandma also grew up in the South, grew up in North Carolina, spent most of her life in the South in general. And so almost all my life whenever we're telling my grandma a story, and it could be like, we were somewhere and we got bad customer service, or it could be we were telling her some story and something good happened with some stranger we met, but my grandma always has the same question.

Amena Brown:

So if I go to her and I'm like, yeah, I went, bought this dress and the person in this store, they were really helpful. And she'd be like, okay, well, the person in the store, were they Black or were they white? And I want you to know that when my grandma says this white never has a T on it. I don't know where the T went, I don't know where the T disappeared to, but she's saying, "Are they Black or are they white?" Okay. And it's just like some breath at the end, I don't know what happened to the T. So dear listener that is asking me this question, I want to ask you, when you are referring to your friends, are they Black or are they white? Is what I want to know. And I want to assume from this question that this is a friend that is white, but I'm going to try and answer for both possibilities that you may have a friend who is white. It may be a friend who's not white, but they may not be Black.

Amena Brown:

So I think the first thing I want to tell you of course, is a story. Anyone that's friends with me knows that when they ask me for advice, it typically it starts with a story and then I have to get to the practicalities. So I want to tell you about a white women lunch that I went to once and that taught me a lot about what it means for me to really be friends with white people, to have white people in my life that are my friends that I trust. Okay. And some of you are listening and you're like, you're married to a white man, I am. And in this situation, I am referring to white friendships and there may be another episode where my husband and I will come on here and we can talk about all the things. But in this moment, when I talk about having trusted white people in your life, I'm really very specifically here talking, not just about family members, which my husband is my family member, but I'm talking about what it means when you're interacting with white people in friendships.

Amena Brown:

And especially in this case, this listener as a Black person, how you navigate that and make sure that you're not in a friendship that is going to be unhealthy for you, that's going to be a situation where someone is expecting you to make yourself small. Okay. So here's my story about my white women lunch. So many of you know that in my previous part of my career, I worked in white conservative Christian evangelical spaces. Okay. Some of you are still hearing me say that and you're like, why? I hope you're able to discern some of these things from previous episodes. But anyways, so I was in Nashville and when I worked in white Christian space, Nashville is like the headquarters and Dallas as a second. But anyways, Nashville, big headquarters there. So I was at a lunch with some white women that I had met along the way, over the years, white women that I had done lots of events with and been in green rooms with.

Amena Brown:

I have to say of all of them sitting there, maybe I'm trying to think, had I ever actually been to any of their houses before? I don't think so. So they weren't necessarily friends that I would have considered super personal friends, but I did consider as friends at that time because we worked together in a way, it felt like we were colleagues. And sometimes we would have somewhat personal conversation in the green rooms, but the green rooms were the main place where we talked. So we were at this lunch and maybe it was a dinner, I really can't remember, it was a meal. And we were talking about something and I don't remember what made me say this, but I said out loud to them, based on whatever conversation we were having that, you know what, actually now I think that what brought us into this conversation was Beyonce.

Amena Brown:

And this should have been a clue to me right here, because one of the white women at the table, I'm not going to say any of their names because some of you may know them or know of their work. But one of the white women at the table was very upset about Formation, Beyonce's video for Formation had come out and she was very upset about it. And she was like, I don't understand what that was about. And it kind of seemed like she's trying to get people to worship her and she's trying to get them to get in formation to worship her. And I don't understand the different images that were in there, just really, it's troubling to me. And so first of all, I am a person that's very much like, oh, I'm sorry, did you speak against Beyonce because I think the conversation is over now? So this right here should have told me like, no, sis this ain't what you want.

Amena Brown:

And so I think I tried in a little bit of a sound bite to try to explain to her that Formation is not for her, that it's something Beyonce made for Black women. And so I think that led us into probably for the first time with most of those women that we'd ever talked about race together. And so I think I used that as an example, because I think an SNL sketch had come out after Formation got released. There were like all these white people running around like, no, not Beyonce, we thought she was one of us. And so I said to them at the table, I thought the sketch was funny, but I also had a moment where I was like, oh, I feel like there may be some white people that have seen me at events and see me in a lot of predominantly white spaces that feel similarly about me.

Amena Brown:

They think I am their safe Black person, they think that I think the same way as they think, I just happen to be Black. They think that it doesn't bother me when Black people are murdered at the hands of the police, they think it doesn't bother me when white supremacy or racism is what takes the life of a Black person away. And it does bother me and it does matter to me whether I say anything or not. Whether I felt comfortable to say anything or not, I'm still Black every day. And y'all, I said that at the white woman lunch, dinner meal, whatever it was, and it was stone silent at the table. Okay, nobody said anything, it was just silent for a long period and then somebody said something else that totally changed the subject.

Amena Brown:

And I'm talking about, I'm at this white woman dinner meal, whatever, and there are probably five or six white women sitting at the table, very influential in the arena where we were all in at that time, they said nothing to me. And in that moment I realized that we weren't really friends because if we were really friends, that silent moment would not have happened that way. Even if that moment comes up and you're like, oh, I feel horrible hearing this, I don't know what to say. I've got a lot to learn, those are also statements that you can say and I hope you do that work to actually learn. But the fact that they didn't say anything, let me know that I am not actually their friends, I am someone they enjoyed chatting with in the green room.

Amena Brown:

For some of them, I could have been a Black person or Black woman that they enjoyed being able to be associated with in some of those professional environments we were in, but at the end of the day, they were not able to welcome the fullness of what it means for me to be Black and for me to be a Black woman. So I'm telling you that story to tell you that you don't want to have people in your life that you can't be your full self with. And we are all of our identities simultaneously, we're not able to parcel different pieces of our identities, different places. I'm not able to go one place and be like today, I'll just be a woman and I won't be Black, but over here, I won't be a woman, I'll just be Black, I don't have a way to do that. I am at all points and at all times, Black and woman and whatever your identities are, you are at all times those things, and you don't want to have friends in your life that make you feel like they wanted to accept these different pieces of you.

Amena Brown:

Like in that moment, I felt like these women want me to be Christian because that's an identity we share. Maybe they want me to be woman, but they wanted me to pack up my Blackness in that moment and put it away somewhere because my Blackness was making things awkward, but it wasn't my Blackness making things awkward, it was racism and white supremacy, making things awkward. And that's really important to remember, you're not the one causing the fuss, you're not the one causing division by being who you are. And I'll speak to this, whether that is your racial identity as a Black person or as a Person of Color, whether that is your gender identity or your sexual identity, these are who you are, you don't want to be friends with somebody that's asking you to pack that away because it makes them uncomfortable.

Amena Brown:

So I want to follow this by answering an extra question when you said, what should I do? I would say, think about what it means to have people in your life who are trusted friends. Okay. And I want to give you a couple of things to think about as far as how I know that the white people that are in my life are trustworthy. And there's only a small number of white people in my life that I feel this way about to be very truthful. But here are a couple of things. One, I feel that they are trustworthy friends in my life when they are doing their own work regarding disentangling themselves from white supremacy, which is lifelong work, they're doing their own learnings around racism and racist systems in America. They are not expecting me to be their Black friend, to be their educator, to be their workshop facilitator, they're doing that stuff on their own time.

Amena Brown:

Sometimes they're doing that stuff and not even talking to me about it because they're doing that because they want to do some good in this world, because they want to be fighting against these systems of injustice, because they want to check their own privilege. They're doing that work, they're not just doing that work because me, they're doing it because they believe it's true and honest and just to do. And so that makes me feel like work, you're doing that work, you're learning, you're not expecting me to teach you. Also, when I have had moments like this, where I can say this moment I had right here, this experience, this is really hard on me as a Black woman specifically and this is why. And when I can say those things to the few of my friends I have, my few close friends that are white, when I say those things, then they are not like, well, I'm not really sure that actually happened the way you're describing here. I don't know, maybe, did you think about it this way? If you said it differently then maybe they wouldn't have responded.

Amena Brown:

They're not doing that kind of stuff, they're listening to me and holding space for my experience while also being able to admit they don't personally know my experience because they're not in the body that I'm in. They're not having this experience, but they're holding space for the fact that I am. Okay. So in this question, you have a friend who could be white or could just be someone that's not Black that cannot hold your honest perspectives and experiences. I think the hurtful part is realizing that they either may not be your friend at all, or they may not be a good friend for you. And I want to say to you, it is not your job to help them fix this, it's not your job to help them learn, it's not your job to become their teacher, their guru, their whatever, it's your job to be yourself and it's their job to do that work on their own.

Amena Brown:

And I find that for those relationships that are I guess, what we would call interracial friendships, if I can use that term, especially when one of those people in the friendship is Black, you need somebody that wants to hold that space and wants to do their own learning and their own education. So it may be a friendship that's going to end. It may be a friendship you may not be able to keep, but you want to have some of those things in your mind of what does it look like to have a friend that can actually hold space for your experiences? So I hope that helps. Come on. Okay. Next question is, how do you end a friendship that's no longer serving you? That seems like a good transition. I feel like sometimes you can have that conversation, like I know in these Q&A's, there are some places I've been saying to you all that, between dating and friendships, sometimes there's a little Venn diagram, there's a little middle part that's common between the two.

Amena Brown:

And when we think about having a breakup from someone that we dated, when we think about needing to end that relationship, we typically picture ourselves wanting to have a conversation with that person, so that they're clear on the fact that this is ending so that they're clear on why it's ending. And I want to say, if you can then have the conversation, I can only think of one time in my life that I went to someone to have a conversation to end a friendship. And you got a chance to hear my conversation with my friend Celita in our episodes. We did a two-part conversation about that because our friendship did survive a breakup. But even when I went to Celita and said, "Hey, I need some space there's things I'm figuring out." I really didn't intend to be like, this friendships over forever, I don't think I ever thought that. It might have come across that way and I don't think I really wanted that, I just do at that moment. I needed a break, a space, sometimes, something.

Amena Brown:

But I did have a friendship once, this was actually a guy friendship and this was a guy who I had gone to high school with, he was my best friend, one of my best friends from high school. And I was also secretly in love with him to be honest, and I'm like, I'm not sure, was it secret? Was it not so secret? But I was in love with him. And we stayed friends after high school, all through college, into our twenties and almost into our thirties as well. We reconnected we were in our late twenties again and had that moment as adults. Like, why didn't we ever do this? And he was like, I'm growing up, I'm getting serious about my life and me getting serious about my life makes me think about you and makes me think about maybe the possibilities of what this could be if we could make a relationship of this.

Amena Brown:

And I really wanted to do that because my high school self totally thought I was going to marry that man, to be honest. And then I met my now husband and I knew when we first started dating that, that was it for me. I knew that I wanted to marry him, I knew that even though my friend from high school had been just a crush that I'd had for a long time and all these different things that I thought were going to happen in our future, once I started dating Matt, I knew in dating Matt that there were other things that I wanted in a man that my friend from high school just didn't have and that I wanted that fullness that I was finding in this new relationship. And so I ended up having to have a face-to-face conversation with my friend from high school to let him know, this is it for us.

Amena Brown:

Because we had the kind of friendship that I feel like, some people you can have friendships with people that you may have been attracted to in the past, or you may have wanted to date in the past or something. And sometimes you can end up actually having a friendship of that, but I didn't see a way that he and I could remain friends. I felt like our friendship had really gone beyond a point of being platonic anymore. And so it was a moment of me having to look in the eyes of someone that had feelings for me, that I'd had feelings for him in the past and tell him that I'm in love with this other man, and I'm going to have a great life with him and him looking at me and being like, dang, I really didn't want to hear that, but I care about you and I want the best for you. So I bow out of that. And for us, that conversation meant the end of our friendship. And so am I glad that I had that closure? I'm absolutely glad.

Amena Brown:

And I also want to say to the listener that asked this question, you may not always get that closure in the way that I was able to get it. I mean, in my whole life, that's only happened to me once that I can say I had a conversation and the friendship was over and that was that. And we both walked away at peace about the conversation we'd had. So how do you end a friendship that's no longer serving you. You can get your courage up and if the other person's willing, you can have a conversation and walk away from it, both of you hopefully feeling a peace about it, or you may feel at peace about it and the person across from you may hate it, really bad, but you know this is what you need to do for yourself. The other thing I want to say is sometimes it may not require a conversation or sometimes as we talked about with ghosting, sometimes you may discover that person is not in a place where you can or need to have that conversation with them.

Amena Brown:

So a lot of my friendships that have actually ended, we didn't talk about it, it started with just some space. And I normally take that space when I feel like I'm in a friendship that's no longer serving me. I take some space to see how do I feel about this? What are the vibes? And sometimes when I take that space, we just never return to each other, and that's how the friendship ended. And I think it's okay to let space and time tell you what is going to happen. Because sometimes you're burdened thinking, oh man, I think this friendship is over now, all these things. And sometimes the other person's feeling like maybe it's over too and maybe you let space and time tell you and you let that be your closure, let that be your peace.

Amena Brown:

those would be my two things, try a conversation if you can. It takes a lot of courage and it can be tough, but try that if you can. And if not, give yourself and that friendship space and time away and see if it's something that you want to return to, or if the other person feels the same way as you. Last question, why is it so hard to make and keep friends as an adult? Let me tell you why. This is why. Okay. When we were in high school, we had school, you're seeing those people every day for all those hours for five days a week. And then some of us went to college, so then you're in a situation where some of those people, you're living in a dorm with them. That's your roommate, that's your suite, mate, these are people you went to class with, pull the all nighters with. Some people that joined the military or went into other sorts of trade school or job training, you had these early twenties moments where you were in almost a living situation with people.

Amena Brown:

Maybe you all lived in that same apartment complex or lived in that same neighborhood in your twenties. And there were just these ways that you could be really available for random friendships all the time, because we really were living so close to each other and in each other space so much. But as we get older, which for a lot of us may happen when we're in our mid to late twenties, going into our early thirties, we are branching out in our own work lives, we're moving to different areas of town that are more helpful for us or where we live. Some of us may be starting a business and that's going to change our dynamic of our availability. Some of us became parents, some of us got a partner and now that's a relationship that you're cultivating. So there's a lot of things there that play a role in why it's hard to make and keep friends as an adult. But here are my suggestions for what to do.

Amena Brown:

If you want to make friends as an adult, first of all, in general, think about your social life and ask yourself, do you really have one? Okay. You're going to work, you're coming home, maybe you got your pets or your plants or whatever, but what do you do outside of work and being in your house? Do you have other social things that you love to do? Do you like to play video games? Do you like to craft or crochet? Is there a sport that you like to play just leisurely or whatever? And whatever that is, try to find ways to reconnect to something that you're interested in, and it really, it could also in certain ways be connected to your job, I do think that can be a way to also make new friends, maybe not at your job, but if you think about your industry, there are all sorts of ways that you can. Of course, in the before times you could go to different conferences, you can connect with people online. So you can even use your job or your career as a way to try to connect with other people.

Amena Brown:

But think about your social life, think about something you enjoy doing outside of work, if possible, and try to find ways to connect with other people. When it's safe to, you can do a little Meetup situation or do a Facebook group if you're a Facebook person. Follow the hashtags of things that are important to you online, and that also connects you to some other people. Okay. And the second part of your question, how do you keep friends? I want you to think about how can you cultivate the current friendships that you have, and we talked a little bit about this in the episode about girlfriend's poem, are there friends that you can stay better connected to? And also, let me give you a little bit of advice, when it comes to keeping friends as an adult, I want to talk a little bit for a second about keeping new friends and I want to tell you to take your time. Maybe you've got a friend that you've known for 20 years, you call them up and just cry and snide and tell them all the stuff going on in your life.

Amena Brown:

But maybe your new friend isn't ready to hear about your parents' divorce, give yourself some time, pace yourself emotionally, when you make new friends. It's okay if those friendships remain on the surface at first, or if some of those friendships stay on the surface forever. It's okay to have friends that you just talk about the game with. It's okay to have some friends that you just hang out and go shopping with them, or you hang out with them and talk about this nerdy thing that you both love, that's okay. That doesn't mean it's a bad friendship because you're not going to the depths of your soul. But if you're just meeting the person, definitely don't go to the depths of your soul so quick, just give yourself a little space and time to get to know that person, let them get to know you, earn their trust, let them earn your trust. And that is a way that you can keep friends as an adult.

Amena Brown:

I really enjoyed answering your questions. You'll ask some great questions. I know I don't know it all, I don't know everything. I know y'all know that after listening to this podcast. But I hope I was able to provide some things for you think about, or maybe get in conversation with your friends about. Friends are important and when we find good friends, we want to keep them and also we want to be a good friend ourselves too. So thanks for all the good questions y'all. Talk to you next time.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 49

Amena Brown:

That time I met India Arie. That time I went on a really bad date. That time I was directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got mono on Thanksgiving. That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour. That time I ...

Amena Brown:

Hey everybody, welcome back to not only another episode of HER with Amena Brown, but also welcome back to what apparently for me is a month of anniversaries. It's a monthofversaries. Thus far you have already heard me talking with my husband about our ten-year anniversary that was this month, and many of you know, or may already know this from following me on social media, but I am the poetic partner for Tracee Ellis Ross's Beauty Brand, Pattern Beauty, which is a natural hair care brand, and Pattern is celebrating its second anniversary this month. Pattern and I share an anniversary because Pattern's anniversary is the same day as my wedding anniversary.

Amena Brown:

And this month marks the one year anniversary of relaunching my podcast as what Leigh, my assistant has affectionately called HER 2.0. Right? So I wanted to talk to y'all a little bit about ... I feel like this is at that time I episode, but as I was working on what to say to y'all, it kind of feels like a behind the podcast episode. For those of you that have been in our HER living room before, you know when I do, behind the poetry episodes, the poems are different, but a lot of the questions are the same. The form of the episode is the same. So this is me mashing together that time and doing like a behind the podcast episode to tell you a little bit about what inspired me to start the podcast, as well as some things that I've learned, some foibles that I've had along the way.

Amena Brown:

So, what you're listening to now is the relaunch of this podcast, that relaunched September 22nd, actually of 2020, but this podcast originally started in May of 2018. So, what inspired me to start podcasting? I think if I go back to me as a little kid, you know how each kid has different make-believe games that they play. And one of my make-believe games I played as a kid is that I really wanted to work in radio. That was like a childhood dream of mine. I loved listening to radio shows. To me, radio had similar elements to what it could be like being on stage. I mean, as a child, I was very enamored with what Eddie Murphy was doing on stage. What Whoopi Goldberg was doing on stage, and then growing up, listening to different radio shows. In a lot of very particular ways, listening to Black Radio, I really wanted to host a radio show myself.

Amena Brown:

So, I got into podcasting first with my sister-in-law, and shout out to Missi, my sister-in-law and I started a podcast called Here For the Donuts. She and I bonded when I married her brother because we were so close in age, we're only a year apart, but we were at totally different seasons of life. As I was marrying her brother, she was pregnant with her fifth baby. At that time, she was a homeschool mom, running a soap business. So, we were entering each other's lives at this very interesting moment, and carbs was the thing that we really had in common, and that was our middle ground.

Amena Brown:

We would meet each other at one of our favorite donut places, our home base donut place, shout out to Revolution Doughnuts here in Atlanta. And that donut place at the time was the middle ground. It probably still is actually, the middle ground between where both of us live. So we would get together and eat donuts and just talk trash and whatever. I went to an event, so many parts of this story. So I connected with Glennon Doyle on Twitter, and Glennon was touring with ... I can't remember which book it was, but she was touring with one of her books at the time, and she was having an Atlanta event and she DMed me like, "Hey, do you want to come to my event? I'm going to leave a ticket at the door for you."

Amena Brown:

I went to her event and ended up sitting next to this beautiful Black woman at her event. We were probably one of a small number of women of color who were there, but I was sitting next to this wonderful Black woman, and she looked at me and she said, "Is your sister-in-law name Missi?" I was like, "Yes." She was like, "Oh, I've read her blog." Because Missi had a blog that she was writing at the time. She was like, "I read her blog." And she was like, "That's how I knew about you because some of the things that y'all have done together." Missi and I would travel together once a year to a women's conference and stuff.

Amena Brown:

She was like, "Man, I would love to hear more about y'all, like about your friendship." So I sometimes get into a moment in public, y'all, where I just start randomly telling strangers random things. I said to her, I said, "You know what's funny? Missi and I have joked all the time that one day we're going to start a podcast or write a book together. It's all going to be about how we eat donuts and talk about life." Because when Missi and I would talk, we would talk about how our full sentence was here for the donut, stay for the cupcakes because sometimes hard things will happen in life that require you to have donuts to help yourself make it through that tough thing.

Amena Brown:

But also, if you go somewhere and they don't have donuts, if they have cupcakes, you'll stay around for that too. We have these ideas about cupcakes can be a reward when a good thing happens. So I'm just like chatting her ears off at Glennon's event before the event started. When I said to her, "Yeah, Missi and I have been talking about, maybe we'll start a podcast." And she was like, "Oh, well, if y'all start a podcast or make a book or whatever it is ..." She's like, "I would listen to it, I would buy it." I just remember both of us turning back to face forward to be a part of the rest of the event, and I remember my mind being like, "What?"

Amena Brown:

So, that next week I talked to Missi and I told her the whole thing. Then I was like, "Do you think we could do this? Do you think we could start a podcast?" She was like, "Come to my house and let's put our heads together." So, went to her house, Matt and I, met with her and her husband, and we just started outlining what we felt we wanted to do with the podcast. So we just started. Matt was recording us. He has always been my husband and my podcast producer through all of my podcasting adventures.

Amena Brown:

So he would record us and we would always record in person. We would always go to a donut place, all three of us, pick different flavors of donuts and cut them up and taste different ones. So that when we got on the episode, that was the first part of the episode was us talking about what donut flavors we had, shouting out the donut place, and then we would actually get into the episode from there.

Amena Brown:

So, we just had such a wonderful time recording. And then over time, our lives shifted, Missi went from being a homeschool mom, owning a soap business to selling her soap business and going to midwifery school, and is now a midwife. Right? Then I went from being married to a youth pastor to both of us traveling the road together and performing, my husband and I. So as that shifted, then we'd realize like, "Oh, neither of us have as much time as we used to, to do this podcast super consistently." Then we decided to change our podcast over into a pop up podcast. So these episodes still exist out there. You can find the link to that in the show notes, and those episodes are still out there for your entertainment.

Amena Brown:

They were a lot of fun to record. I can't say that we're done with the podcast, I think between our schedules changing and then the pandemic coming in, just really blew both of our lives out of the water and a lot of ways, and I'm sure some of you experienced that too. Those are not the last Here For the Donut episodes. I'm sure that we'll come back to that whenever our lives get to some semblance of a place where we both actually have time to sit somewhere, where it's quiet and record. But that was how I got started podcasting.

Amena Brown:

To get started podcasting with a podcast partner on more of a conversational podcast was really nice. We never had to schedule guests. We could just decide what we wanted the episode to be about and where we wanted to get the donuts from. It was a wonderful adventure to have. That got me curious about, would I be interested in doing a podcast on my own? So, my last book that I released in November of 2017 was called How to Fix a Broken Record, and I was kind of noodling around the idea of doing a solo podcast. I thought the book is a perfect time to try this out. So I did a 10 episode podcast series that was related to my book. My book had, if I remember right, y'all, I think my book had seven sections to it. Each section has an episode to that podcast.

Amena Brown:

Then I think the first episode was my grandmother. I did an interview with my grandmother because I dedicated the book to my mom, my grandmother and my great-grandmother. So I had one episode from my grandma, then seven episodes for each section of the book. Then I had one episode where I talked just through the music with the guest, and then the last episode, my friend Adan interviewed me like turn the tables. So, that was my first time doing a mostly interview-driven podcast, because most of that was each episode that was covering a different section of the book, I would pick a different guest to talk about those things with me, riff with me about whatever the section of the book was about.

Amena Brown:

So, I discovered from doing that 10 episode podcast, I felt like that was a good start because it was a limited series, it wasn't something I intended to do every week or do more seasons of or whatever. I could just do it and it was going to be finished. Then that would give me time to figure out what I wanted to be. By the time it got to be the end of 2017 until the beginning of 2018, I was noodling around a little bit. Will I or won't I do the podcast? But I was also coming fresh off of the book. So, I was really trying to focus on launching the book and all of that.

Amena Brown:

Well, if you've been listening to this podcast, you would be familiar with, there's an episode I did that was Behind the Poetry on Here Breathing. Here Breathing was very much centered on what was one of the hardest years of my life, which was 2018. For 2018 coming in, the way it did, my book had come out at the end of 2017, and I am still to this day, very proud of so much of what I wrote in the book, but it also felt like I worked so hard on the book, and the book really didn't have the support that it needed to really get out there to more readers. I didn't have a book tour for that book. I lost my booking and management around the same time that that book came out.

Amena Brown:

So as 2018 comes in, I'm very much in a place of, what is going to happen to my career? Just feeling like, here I have this book come out ... I should preface this by saying, at this time in my career, this book is coming out under a Christian publisher. I am still very much involved in the Christian industry side of things. If you're not familiar with that, the book is very important in that industry. The book is the most important thing. If you are a speaker, a blogger, an artist, whatever, the book is really what your career lives and dies on. Right? Because that's how you get more speaking engagements.

Amena Brown:

Because you've written this book and the books that typically excel the most in Christian industry space, they're one of two things, either they're books that are very much centered on your story, and typically if your story has a lot of part or difficult elements to it, right, or it's a Bible study, and those were your choices. I didn't feel like I was the type of person that wanted to write books that were Bible studies, and so I leaned more towards writing something that was memoir-esque but I also wanted to do that with this comedic lens. Right?

Amena Brown:

So, to have a book come out, it's like a lot of energy and time goes into that, but then to have it come out and marketing wise and tour wise, watch it peter out, was devastating more than I could have anticipated because it's hard writing a book, it's really, really hard, especially when you're writing a book about yourself and about your own life. You're really having to dig into potentially some things that were painful to you. You're having to dig into yourself a lot in a way that you would not for a lot of other projects.

Amena Brown:

And so, to have done that type of digging, and then just watch the book peter out was really hard. Right? But then I get into 2018 and I'm like, "Well, I just wrote this book, but I'm not getting any of the benefits of the book career wise." Right? Like the hope is you've got a book tour, you've got some events lined up. My whole calendar for 2018 for the most part was clear. And then as you heard me describe in more detail in the Here Breathing episode, I also got what I thought was going to be this amazing opportunity to work possibly for a very well-known radio station here in Atlanta. They were about to launch a new show. They were looking for a woman to add to this ensemble cast for the show.

Amena Brown:

And I made it through one interview, but I didn't make it past the second interview. Before I knew it, the show got launched and I saw that someone else had been chosen obviously, and it wasn't me. Of course, I had a time right there of just feeling a combination of feeling very angry, very frustrated, and also very sad, right, in a big overwhelming sense of sadness and disappointment, just feeling like ... I don't know if any of you have ever been through a season of life like this, but just feeling like everywhere you turn, you feel like you can't win. That's what that season of life felt like to me.

Amena Brown:

So I gave myself some time to lick my wounds. Then I started to think, I was so excited about this radio opportunity, but I still have podcasting, and I could start a podcast where I don't have to work with an ensemble if I don't want to, I could start a podcast and I can interview whoever I want. Like I'm the one that gets to control the content that's there. So my original idea was, I'm going to start a podcast that's going to be like the Amena Brown show, and some of you that are here listening have been following me before I was podcasting on this podcast. You knew me from stage and performing poetry and different things like this.

Amena Brown:

And so, there's a lot that I put into my stage show, and a part of it is this combination of having different segments that I would do in the show. Some of it felt a little like late night show, inspired esque type of bits and different things in addition to my storytelling and the poetry. Right? So I thought to myself, "What if I could replicate that and really put myself into that for this podcast and make the Amena Brown show?" But I'm going to tell y'all honestly, I didn't do that because I felt so emotionally overwhelmed at the time, because I was looking through to the book and thought the book was going to help take my career to the next level, and then it didn't.

Amena Brown:

And I was hoping there were going to be some gigs related to the book. They were going to help take my career to the next level, and they didn't. Right? I started looking at the podcast more so as a way to keep ... this is the only way I know how to say it, even though Christian industry is not the streets, but sometimes the values are still the same as the streets. But anyways. I just felt like I have to keep my name out there. What I was going to say is I have to keep my name out in the streets, but I had to keep my name out there. In the type of work that I was doing before the pandemic, it was very event driven, and my experience doing event work as a performer is that everything is a link to the next thing, like you doing this event might get two people to be interested in you to book you for two more events. Right?

Amena Brown:

There, for me, was a lot of pressure. I didn't necessarily feel the pressure of like, "I have to do really great on stage." I feel like I was in myself on stage and I do well on stage. It's a comfortable place for me. It was more so all the other promotional stuff that went with it, right, that I just left Chicago doing this event. I've got to get pictures of myself performing live there. I've got to get pictures of myself hanging around town. I've got to ... All this stuff. It has to go on social media to tell the story to social media that I perform poetry at events like this, to hope that that is going to also inspire someone maybe on my social media or looking at my website or whatever to want to book me. That was how as a performer, that's how you stay working basically.

Amena Brown:

So for me to be at that point where my calendar was just tumbleweed, nothing was going on, I looked at the podcast and thought, "This is a way that I can keep my name out there, that I can keep busy in a way, and it will remind people, "Oh yeah, that's right, Amena. We can have her come and do this." Honestly y'all. So that was really one of the things that made me want to start this podcast. Okay? I'll tell you the other thing that made me choose the format I chose, I put the Amena Brown idea on the shelf because I felt like that was going to take a lot more engineering and doing, and I've always loved interviewing people. I have had journalism experience back in the day, and so the idea of interviewing folks, I really loved that.

Amena Brown:

And having been not only in Christian industry, but also in white Christian industry, and having built community with a lot of women of color who were also in those spaces that were speakers, authors, bloggers, singer songwriters, all of us had this web of connection among ourselves, where we would talk about the different organizations, the different events, how we felt they treated us or not. We would recommend to each other if we thought you should go back into that space as a Woman of Color, and if you do go there, ask for this pay, if you do go there, only stay this amount of time, or some events it would be like, "Don't ever go there and don't ever work with those people." Right.

Amena Brown:

But the overwhelming sense among us at that time, who were all in this Christian industry world, was that Women of Color were not getting the resources that they needed. They were not getting the marketing and the promotions that they needed. They were not getting the pay that they needed, and Christian industry when you're inside of it, and I'm sure this is true of other industries as well, but when you're inside a Christian industry, it feels huge. Everything feels massive and expansive and big. Right? But when you really step back, Christian industry is actually very small, which means there were a limited number of slots for things in general, and then especially a limited number of slots for Women of Color. Right?

Amena Brown:

And typically there was one slot where only one woman of color, like all these events would happen and they'd have 10 speakers, only one of those slots would end up going to a woman of color. Or if it wasn't just that, then it was like, if they were really trying to "diversify" then they'd be like, "Well, we'll have an Asian woman, a Black woman and a Latina here." But those were three slots. There can never be two or three Black women or five Asian women, or two or three Latinas. There could never be that because that was the limited amount of slots. So, as my Women of Color sisters were coming out with their books and wanting better opportunities for themselves to be able to provide for the organizations that they had founded, to be able to provide for their families and provide for themselves. Right?

Amena Brown:

All those things were happening, and I realized even on the promotional end, that there weren't a lot of places even where Women of Color knew when their books come out, for example, where were they supposed to go? What podcasts, what blogs were they supposed to be on? There were just so many limitations specifically in the way that industry was run. So I thought to myself, I will use whatever little size platform I have right now, I'm going to use that and I'm going to elevate the voices of Women of Color, and I'm going to have a podcast where that all I do is, I interview women of color.

Amena Brown:

I decided it was going to be a seasonal podcast. So the first season I decided to use the theme body, and each season I approached the theme from the lens of a poet. Right? So I would take the word body and think how many different ways can I explore that word in a season of time? So, for example, I think I interviewed a pastor because she was pastoring the body of Christ. Right? I interviewed Anowa Adjah, that episode is on the relaunch here as well, and she talked about being a personal trainer that trains the body.

Amena Brown:

I interviewed a friend of mine about being a writer and working with the body of a paragraph. Right? So that was a lot of fun and really creative for me, a way to approach podcasting with what I hoped was this fresh lens, and also it gave me an element of a platform that when my Women of Color sisters in that market were coming out with their books, were launching initiatives or organizations or whatever it was, I had a place where I could highlight their work and try to do the best I could to spread the word, try to use my microphone well. Right? I will say this about Body.

Amena Brown:

I think that theme came to me because I had had fibroid surgery in 2017 and really learned a lot about the limitations of the body, the amazing things that the body can do and recover from. So that was interesting to me to explore that. So by the time we got into season two in the fall of 2018, season two was on the theme, lost and found, which had been coming up a lot in my poetry. So I wanted to explore what are the things that we lose, and even when we lose certain things, are there ways that we feel found even in that, are there things that we find in the process of the things that we lose? I mean, that kind of question was very interesting to me. That's what inspired that second season.

Amena Brown:

But by the time I got to the second season, I started having some different thoughts and I was like, "Okay, I started this podcast because I'm here in Christian industry, and I wanted to uplift the other Women of Color that I knew that are brilliant, that are amazing, that are not getting the shine and the microphone that they deserve." Right? But I also started realizing, I don't know that I want this podcast to be "Christian" and if any of you are familiar with American Christian culture, it can be very like, "Are you a Christian poet, right, are you a Christian artist, are you a Christian rapper?" Like those types of things. Right?

Amena Brown:

And typically it's not that they mean like, "Oh, are you a person that raps and is also Christian?" They mean, are you doing content that are in Christian spaces would deem to be Christian? Right? I was like, "I don't think I want to be doing a Christian podcast because I want this podcast to be broader than just this industry, than just that subculture." So in the season of lost and found, I started really trying to expand the reach of who I was asking to be on the podcast even more so by the time I got to the third season with Create. Right?

Amena Brown:

So I had a wonderful time, any time on the podcast you hear that we are doing an episode from the HER archives, you're hearing episodes that were recorded in the HER 1.0 version. Right? So I was planning to go into season four, and my theme was going to be Taste, and I was just about to start working with Leigh on figuring out who I was going to interview. I mean, I think we even had the list together. We were about to start pitching folks, and then the pandemic hit. Now, let me do a little rewind because the pandemic tipped here in America in March of 2020, I had a stacked travel schedule from January to right crashed, almost right into the pandemic tipping.

Amena Brown:

I've talked about this previously because I've interviewed a couple of people that I was connected to because of MAKERS here on this show, but I went to MAKERS and if you're not familiar with MAKERS, MAKERS is a global summit for women that is invite only that happens in L.A. every year, and the before times, still happens every year now, but of course, virtually now. I have been working with Together Live, which was co-founded by Glennon Doyle and Jennifer Walsh. Together Live was a tour. I had a wonderful time on the tour. I did the tour at the end of 2019, and that tour really, really did a lot for me and my career.

Amena Brown:

Especially as I talked to previously here on the show about me, really wanting to get out of Christian industry and wanting to enter mainstream industry, Together Live played a big role in that. So Jennifer Walsh reached out to me, and a few other artists and speaker folks that had been involved in Together Live. And she said, "Hey, Together Live has an opportunity to open the MAKERS summit in 2020, do y'all want to attend this?" And so I signed up, yes, there were four or five of us, different acts that had been on the tour together.

Amena Brown:

So we got a chance to open MAKERS, which was amazing. I just got a chance to meet so many wonderful people, and Together Live had a wonderful partnership with P&G. So I'm in the green room and the green room at MAKERS is a very fantastic place. I mean, I'm sitting there across from Katie Couric who totally introduced herself to me like, "Hi, I'm Katie." And I was like, "Girl." I really do love that about people who are famous. I love when they're down to earth enough that they just say their first name, very regular to you. I love that even though the fan or the person that knows they're famous is going to always be like, "Girl, I know your first name and your last name. What?" So it was a very convivial environment, everybody's sitting on different couches, talking all the things that you would not be able to do now.

Amena Brown:

This is the same green room where I performed my poem, Margaret for Judy Blume, because Judy Blume was also speaking at MAKERS that year. So I was sitting on some couches with Jennifer Walsh and one of the women, Allison, who was a higher up at P&G, we were all talking around. I was honestly, at that point, y'all, trying to figure out how am I going to better fund the podcast? Because even though podcasting is free to the listener, for the podcaster, it is not free. It has some cost. Right?

Amena Brown:

I mean, thankfully I'm married to someone that does sound design and music production, and so, for my husband to be able to be my podcast producer, it's amazing. I married somebody that had those talents, but if I wasn't married to him, that would be additional costs, plus hosting, plus whatever you need to do to try to market your podcast. All the things. Right?

Amena Brown:

So I had actually talked to Allison from P&G and I was asking her, "Hey, I'm trying to figure out some different ways I can really elevate my podcast, elevate my show, maybe get some sponsors on it." And she was like, "Oh, I don't know anything about that." But she was like, "I know who does, I'm going to introduce you to Kim Azzarelli who is one of the founders of Seneca Women." So she introduces me to Kim, Kim and I have a 20 minute talk because I'm headed to the airport, and her schedule is so crazy at MAKERS. And it turns out that Seneca Women was in the process of launching a podcast network. At that time, she was still in talks, figuring out where the launch was going to be, but she was like, "Oh man, it would be so great to have a podcast like yours under the network."

Amena Brown:

Wonderful meeting, I feel super great about it. I leave MAKERS, and basically a month later the pandemic tips. Right? So at that point, I'm thinking all those conversations I had with Kim are great and fine, but that's probably not going to happen now because everybody's going to want to be holding onto all the resources they can because who knows what all this pandemic is going to mean for businesses and all this stuff? Well, shout out to Kim because she stayed in touch with me. Even after the pandemic had started, she would just reach out to me and keep me updated. Like, "Hey, I just wanted to follow up on our conversation."

Amena Brown:

Now I know that Seneca Women Podcast Network is going to be launched under iHeart. She was like, "Are you still interested in having your podcast under my network?" And I was like, "I'm totally interested." She was like, "Send me some of your favorite episodes and let's talk again." So I sent her those, she listened and she said to me, "What would you think about changing this podcast from a seasonal to a weekly?" And she was like, "If you could change it over to a weekly, I think it would be so great." Because Kim also attended Together Live in New York as part of the tour in 2019.

Amena Brown:

So she had seen me on stage and she was like, "What you're doing when you're on stage, I would love to see you incorporate that into the show." And the wild thing is, y'all, as soon as she said it, it came to my mind that she was basically saying she would love to see what was my original idea of the "Amena Brown show." So that felt like a really full circle moment to me because I realized that all this life, all the things that I'd gone through experienced all the disappointments and what felt like setbacks had all led me back to my actual original idea why I wanted to start this solo podcast in the first place.

Amena Brown:

So she said, "Dream up for me what you would do with this, write it up and let's keep talking about it." And so by the time it got to be the summer of 2020, I was getting a podcast deal, and Kim was like, "A big part of Seneca Women is really wanting for women to have equitable experiences in the workplace, with pay, with the ability to be resourced, promoted." That's the work that Seneca Women has done in the corporate space. And so, she was like, "I want to get you a good deal here." We did all the things, all the contracts and all that stuff that's involved, and I looked up and I was relaunching my podcast in the middle of the pandemic, but able to do it this time with much more resource and with much more help.

Amena Brown:

So, I went from sometimes doing a season a year, sometimes doing two seasons a year, and my seasons would normally cap out at like 10 or 12 episodes. I went from that to now going to do 48 episodes in a year's time. It was hectic changing the podcast over from being seasonal to being weekly. But one of the things that I was able to add, which I've really enjoyed as I'm doing this episode with you now, is when I did HER 1.0, I never did solo episodes. They were all interviews, all conversations, which I thought were wonderful, but I loved being able to do some solo episodes. And when you all responded like, "We also love to listen to those episodes." Then that turned out to be nice.

Amena Brown:

So, that was what made the vibe of the Amena Brown show. I had some episodes where I could just come in and chat, y'all, about whatever it is. I had some episodes where I could bring a guest into our living room and bring them into some of the conversations that we were having, which I really loved. But it was very hectic. If you've been listening to this podcast, since it relaunched, you probably remember that those first two or three months, it was like so much content, segments on segments. So many things. It definitely took me a while to realize like, "Oh, I'm here every week with people. I can keep it simple sometimes."

Amena Brown:

So I finally settled into a rhythm and figured out how to come to the podcast microphone the same way that I would come to the mic when I'm on stage or really what's in my mind is my open mic and my husband and I, which is part of how we got together. Honestly, we were doing an open mic here in Atlanta. We did that open mic for nine years and it was like a quarterly open mic, and I would host it and he was deejaying it. When I would come there as a host, I really didn't do huge amounts of preparation and these very produced bits of anything. I would just come there and talk to the audience about random stuff I've been thinking about since the last time I'd seen them, and being able to bring that communal feeling here has felt so wonderful.

Amena Brown:

The only thing I miss honestly, y'all, is that I can't see you, that I can't see any of you, that we can't like have that interaction moment on stage, and don't worry, I am definitely in talks with my team right now, trying to figure out how we can eventually do some her live events, whether that's going to be virtually or eventually when we're able to do things in person. So we're trying to figure that out. So I have a way to see you and interact with you, but I loved that. The reason why I call this the HER living room is for two reasons. One is for the first reason that I've always shared with you all, the living room tends to be the place I gather with my own girlfriends, and that's where we have deep conversation.

Amena Brown:

It's where we talk just wild about whatever random stuff we want to talk about, but the place where we used to have our open mic, this fantastic coffee shop here in Atlanta owned by this wonderful Black woman, shout out to Cassandra Ingram, Urban Grind coffee shop. The center of the coffee shop feels like a living room. It's all these different couches and comfy chairs. So, I wanted to replicate that here for us. I wanted it to feel like when you're listening to this podcast, that you can have something cozy to drink with you. You can be in your car and just be comfortable, lean back, not too far while you drive, but just feel like you're a part of a conversation, and it was important to me to replicate that.

Amena Brown:

People ask me all the time, what are quick tips I would give to anybody if they're interested in podcasting. I feel like I probably need to do a separate episode and maybe revisit this, but I'll give you just a couple of things off the top of my head. Podcasting can be a business, but it doesn't have to be. I think if you're considering podcasting, you should think about, is it something that you want to do for fun? And that's okay. Or is it something that you want to become a business? You want it to make you money?

Amena Brown:

I was just reading a Twitter thread recently and an article also about what happens when we monetize our hobbies, and is it important in this age of capitalism to have some hobbies that we choose not to monetize. Right? And for Missi and I, Here For the Donuts was one of those. That was something that we chose not to monetize. We chose to keep Here For the Donuts for fun. We chose not to saddle ourselves with having to create a new episode every week if our lives just didn't allow for that, and I think with podcasting, it's important to think about that.

Amena Brown:

People of course will tell you like, "Well, in order to gain this size of audience, you need to have this many episodes you put out, and they need to be put out on this day and this time." And all those things. I'm not saying those things aren't true. I'm saying you have to think about what's most important to you, and are you wanting to enter the podcasting space because you want to have fun? If you want to have fun, then stick to that, and if you want it to be a business, you can still have fun too, but there will be other things required, and I think it's important for you to know. I knew that I wanted HER with Amena Brown to be a part of my brand, to be a part of our business that we have. So I had that in mind already. Right?

Amena Brown:

I would also second to that say, whatever you decide to do with your podcast idea, to think of something that's actually sustainable for you. I know that people will tell you all the things about all the numbers and all that stuff, but really think about what is sustainable for you. You may have listened to one of the archived episodes from the previous version of HER. I shared with y'all a guest, Alice Wong, our conversation, and Alice Wong, she is fantastic. She is also a podcaster. Alice talks about how she releases her podcast when she can, she's not going to pressure herself.

Amena Brown:

She was like, "Sometimes it's a Tuesday, sometimes it's a Thursday. Sometimes some weeks go by. So pick something that's sustainable for you. If you can't sustain a weekly podcast, then do a seasonal one or do it bimonthly, biweekly, whatever works for you, pick that. I would also say, consider your format. Podcasting is an amazing, amazing vehicle for a lot of storytelling. There are a lot of different ways you can do it. For example, under Seneca Women, the podcast, Here's Something Good, is always mostly like less than 10 minutes. It's just like a little pop of some inspiration, some good news to get your day started. It airs Monday through Friday and that's its format. Right?

Amena Brown:

We're also seeing people like Issa Rae begin to innovate in the podcast space and create these podcasts that are centered around storytelling. Right? So think about a format that works for you and be creative. You don't have to do what everyone else is doing in podcasting. There's like a bunch of other things you can do. I would also say, of course, be yourself and still have fun, have fun. This can be good and enjoyable.

Amena Brown:

My last point, which is full circle that I'd say is, I still want to see more Women of Color creators highlighted in the podcast space. I still want to see more LGBTQ folks, more folks in disabled community highlighted in the podcast space. Podcasting is not just for white guys that get together to make a podcast. There are a lot of amazing stories. I want to see more marginalized podcasters actually get to come to the center. That's why I still highlight women of color on my podcast, and that's why I still love podcasting even after all of the different changes that I've experienced, and all the things that I've had to learn.

Amena Brown:

Last thing I want to tell you, I don't do this podcast by myself. If I were just doing this all alone, this podcast wouldn't be. Okay? So I want to give a shout out to the team of folks that are always helping this podcast happen and helping make it work. Of course, I want to shout out Kim Azzarelli and the team at Seneca Women. Hey, Ryan. Hey, Ellen. Shout out to them. Shout out to the team at iHeart, thank them so much. They are a big part of how more of you got to discover this podcast.

Amena Brown:

I want to give a big shout out to my husband and my podcast producer Matt. Who's actually here in the room with me as always for the most part when I'm recording. I want to thank him for taking the time to take a chance on seeing how we could figure out how to do this, and now podcast production has become a part of our business. My husband has so many other clients as well that he gets a chance to produce podcast for them and help them use this vehicle to tell stories. So, this podcast would not sound as good as it does if it were not for my husband, Matt. So I want to thank him.

Amena Brown:

Big shout out to my manager, Celeste, who just helped me reshape this podcast when it was time to turn it over into a weekly. And she and I just have such a great brain share of figuring out what do we want to do with this podcast to keep the podcast aligned with the goals of why I wanted to start it in the first place. Special shout out to Miles, who is a part of this team, helping me with social media and a podcast when we first launched, and I have to thank Leigh. Leigh and Matt are the two people on my team that have been with me through 1.0 and 2.0 of this podcast. Leigh is my assistant and she is my friend.

Amena Brown:

I had just started working with her at the end of 2017. She came into my work life at a time that was very hard for me and really was helping me to pick up some of the pieces there. But she is the one that reaches out to the guests and make sure that everything is organized and together and helps me to make sure I'm completing all the tasks that are necessary here. So I just want to give a big thank you to Leigh as well for helping hold this podcast together and for helping put together such amazing show notes. So, any of the things that I'm referring to here, you can find those on the show notes, and the show notes will also give you just a bit more in depth information about these episodes.

Amena Brown:

So, big thank you to Leigh, big thank you to my team. Nobody does amazing things all by themselves. I'm thankful to have such a wonderful team helping me do this podcast. Last, but definitely not least, I'm thankful for you, for all of you listening, that continue to come back to this podcast week after week. I really, really appreciate you. Your comments mean the world to me, your DMs and your tweets to me, your comments on Facebook mean the world to me, please keep it coming. Thank you, thank you so much for listening and cheers to one year anniversary of HER with Amena Brown. I'll look forward to seeing y'all in the living room soon.

Amena Brown:

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

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 48

Amena Brown:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown. And I've been telling you all that September is a month of anniversaries. It is my wedding anniversary. It is the anniversary of the relaunch of this podcast. And as many of you know, I am the poetic partner for national haircare brand Pattern, and this month is Pattern's two year anniversary and ooh, y'all. [musical interlude]. I am excited to welcome into our HER living room the CEO and founder of Pattern, producer, actor, CEO, activist, Tracee Ellis Ross.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Hi. Wonderful to join you here, Amena. We have such a strong creative bond, so it's wonderful for me to enter your family and your world the way you have so beautifully entered and elevated Pattern's and mine.

Amena Brown:

I feel so many emotional vibes. I'm curious to also talk with you and hear how it is feeling to you now at two years of being CEO and founder of Pattern. But first I have to start with the very important questions, Tracee. You're here in the HER living room. I imagine this as the living room where I gather with my girl friends when we go to each other's house. We bring drinks. We bring snacks. When you go to hang out with your girl friends, what is your favorite food or drink that you typically bring to the gathering?

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Well, we often cook together. There's a small gaggle of us. My best and closest sort of core group of girl friends lives in New York. We often are at Monica's house around her kitchen table. Monica's a great cook. I've been best friends with Monica since college. And I usually make something out of what she has as opposed to bringing something, so I'm usually in charge of the salads. I'm a queen of the salads. I also love a bottle of wine. What do we drink? We usually drink wine. We recently have graduated more into cocktails. When we're together, when we travel, we do an Aperol spritz. Romy and I love a dirty martini, and so does Kevin. So we mix it up, but it's a long friendship, so I don't know that there's a regular thing. It's a good 30 years, Amena, with all of us.

Amena Brown:

The depth of a 30 year friendship. Think I've got some friendships a little over 20 years, about to hit the 25 year mark. There's a level of depth.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Yeah. There's something that happens. It's amazing. I mean, there's nothing better than that. It's the next closest thing to family, and it's a different version of family. It's the chosen family. But yeah, 30 years. I mean, Monica and I... Hold on. It might be longer than that. I was 17.

Amena Brown:

Wow. That's dope.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Samira, I was 22. Romy, I was, I think, 25. Even though we went to high school together, we weren't friends in high school. She was a year behind me. So yeah, it's been a long time for all of us.

Amena Brown:

Can you discuss the merits of the salad situation? What are things that you feel are necessary to make a salad, really step it up? Discuss.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Okay, this is a really good topic, Amena. People poo-poo and say, "Oh, salad's not cooking." Bull crap, people. Let me tell you something. There's a lot of really important factors. Number one, bagged lettuce is a no-no.

Amena Brown:

Oh.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

No ma'am. Got to get that lettuce and break it off of its own little heart. You got to wash it by hand. You got to shake it and get that water off. Every time you touch the lettuce, first of all, lettuce is not a sturdy situation. Lettuce is delicate. It is fickle. You've got to be loving with it. You can't dress it too early. Salad dressing out of a jar, bottle, anything pre-made, no ma'am, over, done. The salad has been ruined. Nope. People are always like, "I don't understand what you do to my salad." My ex-boyfriend was like, "I don't even eat salad." And I was like, "You do now."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

He's like, "It's my favorite thing in the world." I make all kinds of salads. I was just thinking of the last time I was with Monica and Samira and the ladies. We did butternut squash on arugula with shallots, so baked butternut squash on fresh, live arugula with sunflower seeds and shallots and a balsamic vinaigrette with a little wee bit of honey in it.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

I also love when I do... I shave the carrots, really thin... I don't know what you call it when they're long and skinny, with olives, green and black olives cut without the pits in them, fennel, red onion. I mean, come on. Come on. And then there's the regular salads that I always make. One of my favorite salads, there's two favorite salads that go with steak, depending on how you're making your steak. You can do romaine hearts with corn, hearts of palm, and red onions with olive oil and lemon, or you can do arugula with apples, red onions. One of my siblings doesn't like fruit in the salad, so I have to put that on the side at home when I cook.

Amena Brown:

Oh. I want to thank you for regaling us with these tips, because I mean, as soon as you said shallots, I was like, oh, I see what we're doing here. This is not a game.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Yeah. I like to tell people shallots are an elegant onion.

Amena Brown:

I do feel that way. I feel like anytime someone's like, "And there are fried shallots," I'm like, "I'll have that," because that's what-

Tracee Ellis Ross:

I'll have that.

Amena Brown:

... a fancy lady would eat, and I want to also be fancy.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Yeah. I'm in charge of the food with my family when we do family whatever. My brother Ross and I do the food.

Amena Brown:

Oh, I love it.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Whether it's the cooking or the, "What are we going to order," but we're in charge of food. My younger brother Evan does snacks.

Amena Brown:

So it's cooking or curation. I respect that, Tracee. I respect that. Being able to be a curator of food, I respect that.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

That's right. You got to figure that out. Is it a pizza night? You know what I'm talking about? Is it Chinese food? What are we doing?

Amena Brown:

And then you got to know where to order from. That's a talent, because I do have some friends, after a while you're like, "You can't be the one who picks anymore because you don't know how to."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

How about those friends that you think you were really close, and then you don't have the same taste buds, and you're like, "Yeah, this is awful and tastes like nothing. So I don't know where your taste level is, but I think our friendship might be over."

Amena Brown:

It's a question. It puts some question marks in the air. I've had some friends when we go to visit places, I'm like, "We're going to choose the restaurant, not you, because there's some levels of food that are okay with you, and I feel life is too short to eat food like that."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Yeah. I happen to, all of my core group, we share the food foodiness.

Amena Brown:

This is important. I feel enriched. I feel enriched.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

I'm getting hungry.

Amena Brown:

I feel enriched and attacked about the bag of salad that's in my fridge, so that's fine. I know the life I need to live now, Tracee. I know the life I need to live. I have been brought to a new level today, so I'm going to work on that. I want to start also by just sharing a mushy moment with you that is Pattern involved. So y'all in the living room, I realized I was going to be working with Tracee and Pattern by getting an email through my website, from a creative agency. Now, of course, Tracee, it didn't say your name and it didn't say Pattern. It was very respectfully nebulous. It was very like, "A campaign is being launched in the air at some point sometime soon. A prominent figure is founding this company. We want to know if you will add a poetic voice to a thing that is happening. Please write us back." At which time, Tracee, I was like, "A scam." So I sent it-

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Yeah. I mean, listen to me. Amena, that sounds like a scam. I'm surprised we're sitting here right now. That sounds like you were being catfished, sucker punched all in one.

Amena Brown:

I was like, "This is a scam." So I sent it to my now manager, but she wasn't my manager then. I was like, "Can you be my manager 20 minutes and find out if this is legit?" So we find out that it is Pattern, and I have my first phone call with you and the team where you were telling me, "Here's the vision for Pattern. Here's what I want the language to sound like surrounding this brand that I'm creating." And I was in my car in a small town in North Carolina right before a gig. My family was in the hotel where I was staying at the time. And I was like, "We can't have my family loud talking while I'm trying to find out what's going on with Pattern right now, number one. And number two, I can't tell y'all it's Pattern or that it's Tracee, so we're taking this call in the car."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

At that point, no one even in the public knew I was even starting a hair brand.

Amena Brown:

Y'all, we were all sworn to secrecy, and I was like, I'm going to keep this secret. Nobody needs to come get my bone marrow, because I was the one revealing this before it was rolled out. Which I do want to say to y'all, at that point, keeping that secret and then seeing how Pattern launched, seeing the rollout, I mean, that is still one of the most amazingly executed rollouts I've ever seen. Because each of us that were involved sort of knew our different parts, but getting to see it all roll out together. So my mushy moment, Tracee, is that we talk through everything, we talk through the fact that we were going to meet up in New York because you were going to be there meeting with other people on the team that were getting ready to help do the launch.

Amena Brown:

And right before we hung up, you said, "Amena, I should've started with this." You said, "your work is truthful, it's soulful, it's full of joy, it's full of lightness. And that is why I want to work with you." And then we all just did our, "Everybody has their assignments. Okay, bye." We hung up. And I sat in my car for a little while, Tracee, because I was in this point in my career, I was turning 39 that year, 2019, and I was experiencing this very strange shake up in my career at a time that I didn't think it was going to shake up.

Amena Brown:

And I just felt this sense of like, there are some things I've been doing, some spaces I've been in. I need to get out of that. My work is trying to tell me it wants to broaden itself, but I know I need to leave where I've been. I don't know where I go from here. And you saying those words to me really impacted me in this way, because I was sort of doing this searching inside, which you didn't know, but you saying those words to me really set me on a path inside of understanding what was possible for my career at that point. So mushy moment. It's on a little Post-it in my office. I'm not going to lie about it, Tracee. It's on a Post-it so I can remember.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

First of all, I really appreciate you sharing that with me. I feel like the touchstones of those moments and being able to give them space and breathing room in community and with another person, and particularly the person that named that for you or whatever that is, it does the same on my side, you telling it. I had my own experience, and I've had multiple mushy moments with you, though, because part of what sort of opened with you and I was my 10 years of dreaming of Pattern and all of the language and words and vision and imaginings, and all of that that I had dreamt of needed to take flight with somebody's expertise.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And part of our conversation was that I started to feel the branches of Pattern growing, and the realization that when you are a CEO, when you've found something, when you find a baby and you make it, then you let all the other hands be a part of it. I was trying to get you to express my vision, but through what you do, your experience, your joy, your light, your rhythm, and all of our hands... As you said, we all went off on assignments. And it becomes this thing that is not mine, it's ours, which is the reflection of what I really wanted the company to be about.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

It's a reflection of who we are, and we're so many different things. And I also remember in that conversation with you, having what had been in my mind and heart for so long, having it come out, and it made it feel really real. This wasn't something that I was just, I don't know, just me in my bathroom or in my bed dreaming. It made it really real. And then the other third piece was, I remember saying to you... Because we had multiple conversations. We had that first one. Then we had the in-person one, which by the way, I've never seen that footage back, Amena. I just remember we videoed that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah, me either.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

[inaudible 00:13:18]. I was like, where'd that go? [crosstalk 00:13:19]-

Amena Brown:

Yeah. We got to find out about that.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

That would be really cool to see that. So we had multiple conversations, and then I remember saying... I remember at the end of every conversation, which is something that we still do, I'm like, "so those are my ideas. Now you go make your magic." And I remember you called me once. You were like, "I don't know if I'm the right direction." I'm like, "Do you think you're in the right direction? I think you're in the right direction." And then we would play some more.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And then remember, that's how the other piece came out from the Manifesta, which the world still has not gotten to feel and hear, but is coming. That was just something that was an offshoot of a moment for you. It was like another piece started spilling forward. It's so funny because it sounds like we're talking about nothing, but we're talking about something. Do you know what I mean? I was like, if someone else is listening, which they're going to be doing, they're going to be like, "What are they talking about?" We're talking about poetry. How do you define poetry? How do you define what you do?

Amena Brown:

I kind of feel like the style of poetry that I write is something like if comedy and monologue and jazz and hip hop tried to come together in something. I feel like that's my style. And maybe a little bit of a soul music writer. I feel like some of that, like the way that Bill Withers was able to... I mean, like that Grandma's Hands, that imagery right there, which I felt was really important in the words I was hearing you say about your vision for Pattern. It felt important that those words needed to be concrete, that when people hear you saying those words, they needed to have visual, have a sense of smell or remember some things because those words were written that way. And I do love for words to do that work. I feel like that's the best thing.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

They do. And they also offer a frame. They offer a mirroring. They offer context and history and tie us to our legacy. They do all of those things. We get to tell our own stories. And we have not always been able to, even though we have been doing it anyway. And particularly as Black women, the power of language and the ability to language feeling, to language history, to language legacy, family, community. How do you put into words what your grandmother's mac and cheese tastes like? you know what I mean? How do you put into words what the experience is of sitting between your aunt's legs with a Goody comb, getting your hair done and having her squeeze you so you don't move?

Amena Brown:

Okay. Okay.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

It's like you say, there's many people in the world that, holding your ear, they don't know the connotation of that. So how do you both not tell for those who don't know, but share for those of us that do in a way that etches our truth in time and that offers an expansiveness to the reality of what is our connection? And so much of that comes through the portal of hair. And it's something that you and I have talked about, but Pattern is not a social justice organization, but at the center of Pattern is the celebration of Black beauty.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And in the world we live in, that in and of itself is a form of activism. It's a form of resistance. And so all of the different pieces of the company and that portal that you have given us access to, even the glossary was something that I dreamt up so many years. I remember where I was. It was like four years before Pattern had a name. I was still trying figure out how to make the company happen. I was like, one day... Because I would go to all these different places and they're like, "You mean kinky hair."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Everybody had these different definitions, and then there were all these different connotations, and this person felt this word was negative, and this one loved the same word, and all these different kinds of things. And I was like, so much of our words that we have come from a paradigm and a system that did not celebrate and see us or see us as beautiful, and certainly didn't understand our hair. And so I wanted to write a legacy that didn't necessarily redefine, but gave our language, our words, the poetry that actually matches our hair. Because the words are so small, but what they connotate is expansive, and so I wanted to redefine the definition, not the words.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. That was a really fun thing to get to do once you shared with me, "This is the vision of what I want this glossary to be like, and I want to still keep this poetic voice." So to get some of those words that, wash day, I mean different terms that we've thrown around and to reimagine them in this poetic form was amazing to get to do. And still, now what I love about the glossary is that it lives and breathes, so there will be different times that-

Tracee Ellis Ross:

It's expanding.

Amena Brown:

... new terms need to be added to it, and then to get to reimagine those terms has been so fun. I want to take you back to New York City when you are there what we now know was six months before Pattern was going to launch, your meeting with everyone, getting all the final touches, put on different things. I am one of the people that is going to be meeting with you. And I remember I was staying with one of my girl friends. Shout out to Jamila. I was staying with her in New York, and I was like, "What we're not going to do is not be late to this meeting." So I was like, "I'm going to leave early enough in case the subway decides to fail or some speed movie happens. I don't want to be late."

Amena Brown:

I get there, and I'm 30 minutes early, and there's a Starbucks down the street from the creative agency where we were all meeting with you. And I remember I had my New York bag because I have my certain things I feel like I need to have when I go to New York. So I had my New York bag, and I walked into the Starbucks, Tracee, and I plopped my New York bag on the table, and I sat down and just hyperventilated for like 10 minutes. I was so nervous about everything because I had the first draft of the Pattern Manifesta to share with you, and I was so nervous. It was going to be our first time meeting in person. And as New York is, this man walks in and he's like, "Is anybody sitting here," and totally sat at the table with me while I hyperventilated, and didn't ask me anything about if I was all right, nothing.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Amena, do you remember the date? Because I think I have those pictures in my phone.

Amena Brown:

Oh my gosh. It was the end of March or the beginning of April 2019, because there was a certain amount of days that you were going to be in town, and we met for two days. I can't remember if it was March 30th and April 1st or if it was April 1st and April 2nd, but it was somewhere around that time. And I did my little hyperventilation for 20 minutes and got myself together. And then I still, honestly, Tracee, even though I had talked to you on the phone multiple times by this time, I was still like, what if I'm still being catfished? What if the whole time it really wasn't Tracee?

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Oh my God. That's [crosstalk 00:21:31].

Amena Brown:

I was like, just not sure. I was wondering if I was going to go up to the elevator and it was going to open up and it was going to be like a scene from Fame where the dancer thought they were getting this amazing audition with this amazing Hollywood director, and instead it was going to be some big, hairy man with a crop top and his hairy belly.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Oh, I can't.

Amena Brown:

And I was going to walk in, and he was going to be like, "You thought you were meeting with Tracee Ellis Ross, but it's me. I'm Tracee."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

I can't believe that even then... I wish I had the picture because I know it's in my phone. I just don't know the date. And I can find it, and I'm going to text it to you. But that's so crazy. You were cool as a cucumber, Amena.

Amena Brown:

Okay, outside, okay, because inside I was freaked out until I... Once the elevator opened up, Tracee, and I saw this is a real creative agency. The name is right there on the wall. I saw you and the team in the boardroom in their meeting. And I was like, you're okay. You're safe. And then you and I went in the room and read through the Manifesta and did what was going to be this amazing creative process of really shaving the piece in these ways, figuring out the things that were there that you wanted more of, the things that maybe weren't there that you wanted some of.

Amena Brown:

And I want to ask you, when you look back on that, now that here we are at two years anniversary of Pattern, when you look back at that moment as you are stepping into CEO even further, what was that time like six months out from Pattern's launch as you're okaying all the things that are going to tell this story that you've had germinating for so long?

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Well, I will also say I surrounded myself with old friends. The creative director is someone that I had known and know, and is a really good friend, for 20 years. Stylist, creative consultant, best friend for 30 years. And I did that on purpose because it gave me my footing. In the places and spaces where I had doubt, I knew I could trust not only their expertise, but their judgment as people that I go to even if it weren't a work project. They're my counsel anyway. But the truth is, I felt so in my element. It was like, I've been waiting my whole life to get a chance to make that kind of baby.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And every step of this company has felt like that. Even the parts when I get wobbly, when I get scared, when I get overwhelmed and feel like I actually don't know, or I don't know if we should have done that. Was that the wrong thing? Whoa. You know what I mean? It didn't feel bad when we decided that, but now that it's hitting the air in the atmosphere, I feel differently about it. I don't know. There's been so many of those moments, so much growth curve on a regular basis.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And I don't think I knew how much was involved, and I love working, especially because the things I work on are things I love, and my hands are in every aspect of Pattern. But the copy on the back of a package, every single thing on the back of a package has to be approved, and I want to make sure it matches my exact intentions and the company's mission and the company's ethos, and that there's no wrong term. And then realizing that even if there are things that you go, "Ooh, I didn't like that, that was a mistake you can," you can, okay, so that's a wash. It is what it is, but you keep it moving.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

One of the things that I discovered in this Pattern journey is that I love a team. I've always loved a team, but it's very different being a CEO in a team than an actor in a team. And it's really interesting to learn something new and to not know how to do it. And I think the biggest thing that I've learned that I like to share with people is, I didn't grow up knowing even what a CEO was. I remember maybe four years ago somebody saying something about C-suites. I was like, "C-suites? Is that a presidential suite?" I was like, "Is that something at the airport?" My brain went to hotel or airport. And they were like, "Like CEO, COO."

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And I was like, "What are you talking about? I don't know what that means." You don't have to know what that means. Being a CEO is based on intention, vision, gut instinct. But what I have really learned is, a successful company is not built from just a mission and a vision. You can't have a successful company without that, but that's not the only factor. Execution, operation, strategy is incredibly important. You can have the best idea. You can have the best product. You can even make that product and it be amazing.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

If you can't fulfill your orders, the supply chain is so complex and so intense... I mean, I'm learning on a regular basis the financials of how you back in things, how with a retail partner versus just direct to consumer or online, how you hold stock. It is no joke. And if your company, and by the way, this is a term I didn't know, scaling. Again, scaling, I'm like, what, how you climb up the outside of a building? How you scale a building? No, it's how a company grows. So as a company is scaling, the growth pains of that. And so for me as an artist, because I am first and foremost an artist, I'm a creative, but I do have a very strong business mind, trying to merge those two things has been exciting and wonderful, but it's a lot of new stuff to learn.

Amena Brown:

Right. I want to ask you about this. What's your favorite thing so far about being the founder and CEO of Pattern?

Tracee Ellis Ross:

The incredible stories I hear in the most fascinating ways and places. They enter into my space and [inaudible 00:28:13] on the street or through a comment on Instagram, or a friend will send me a text that her mom's cousin or something... And I'll get videos and things of like, "My daughter hated her curly hair, but she's embracing it now." "My hair is the softest it's ever been." "My curl pattern is back." The stories that I hear about people embracing their authentic, natural curl patterns and experiencing their hair in a space of beauty and joy is so fulfilling to me, because it's so much of who we are and it's the most beautiful thing. And our culture has really robbed us of some of the most basic joys about our authentic beingness. Sure, the term Black girl magic is lovely, but we're not magic. We're real.

Amena Brown:

That part.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And we're so real and so incredible that to some people, it looks like magic. But I feel like we get to recognize each other and continue to uplift this idea that each unique version of a twist, bend, coil, zigzag is just some piece of art that is connected to a being and a soul and a legacy and a history. And so having that mirrored back in all these many different forms is just the most exciting thing to me.

Amena Brown:

Oh, I love it. I mean, especially remembering that moment where all of us were learning about your vision, and then getting over the last two years, Tracee, to see that vision go out to this community and to see it also belong to us, and that that is what you wanted. That is what you told me in the room. You said, "I want you to write something that I can say, but I want it to belong to us." And I thought that was so powerful. It was so powerful.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Amena, I will take a second here as we wrap up to just say, you reached out to me recently about a piece that you were working on to share it with me, and I was so honored that you consider me as part of your creative circle, because I consider you as part of mine. And so the reciprocity there felt really buoyant for me. There was something about it that made me bounce a little bit.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

And in this pandemic, there's so many things that have been hard, and for many, much harder than others, but I think the deliberateness of how we recognize our tribes, because I think we all have many different tribes, we're in this one and this one and this one, but I just was so grateful. And you were saying that because of the pandemic, your process has changed, and so you have to be deliberate about how you connect and share and grow something. And so I want you to know how honored I was that you would share that with me and how special it was to hear something in its early form as you're in process. It really was special to me.

Amena Brown:

I love our creative juju, Tracee. There's more to come.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Me too.

Amena Brown:

There's more to come.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

There's more to come. There's more to come always. It's just such a joy. It's such a joy. I remember the first moment I saw your smile, the first moment I heard your voice on the phone, and all of the incredible, the deep gratitude I have for what you have shared, your artistry that you have shared with Pattern and helped us to build a brand that really is ours. I'm so grateful. And I was so happy that you asked me at this really wonderful moment of an anniversary to come talk to you, for me to join you in your living room. You know what I mean? It's so good. I'm so grateful.

Amena Brown:

Tracee, thank you so much. And next time I see you, the salad. I'm going to be ready, honey.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Oh, yeah. No, you're going to be ready, or I'm going to make you one. You know what I mean?

Amena Brown:

Thank you so much.

Tracee Ellis Ross:

Thank you, Amena.

Amena Brown:

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.

Transcript: HER With Amena Brown episode 47

Amena Brown:

Y'all, it's been almost a year since my podcast joined Seneca Women Podcast Network and iHeart Media. And I want to celebrate with all of you, my listeners who have been joining me in the HER Living Room every week. I know we can't gather in person. I'm not even sure there's like a house that would be big enough to have a big enough living room for all of us, but I'm glad we have our podcast living room here, and I would love to hear from you. I'm working on an episode to celebrate my HER anniversary and I would love to include you in the episode.

Amena Brown:

Here's what you do. You go to speakpipe.com/herwithamenabrown and leave me a one minute voice message telling me your name and where you're from, if you feel comfortable sharing. And then, tell me your favorite episode of the podcast and why you loved it. Leave me a message by Friday, September 3rd and you could possibly be included on a future episode. But don't worry about writing all of this down. The link will be included in the show notes and the episode description as well. I can't wait to hear from you.

Amena Brown:

Y'all, welcome back to another episode of HER with Amena Brown. Also, a new thing is happening today, the first man to ever be involved in an episode. That's not quite true, actually. The first man to be on the mic because the man who's going to be in this episode is my husband, Matt, DJ OpDiggy Owen, who actually is always involved in every episode because he is the producer. But for this episode, he is coming from behind the producer area and he is on the mic with me. It's also interesting that September is a big month of anniversaries.

Matt:

It is.

Amena Brown:

First of all, it's my husband's birthday in September. The anniversary of this podcast launching under Seneca Women and iHeart Radio is in September. It is Pattern Beauty's anniversary in September, and it is our wedding anniversary in September. So I thought it would be cool to bring my husband from... What is it, in front of the mic behind the mic?

Matt:

I'm just happy to be here.

Amena Brown:

I thought it would be cool for y'all to not just hear my side of the story, because originally I was just going to do an episode telling y'all a little bit of our love story because this year we are celebrating 10 years married, which feels... I don't know, I think we both have had a lot of emotional moments since our ninth anniversary just thinking, it's coming up on 10 years. I mean, a decade feels like a big deal. So I'm going to share the questions that I would have discussed if I were here by myself. But since Matt is also here, y'all will get to hear his answers to these questions too. So I want to start first, babe, with what was happening in both of our lives before we met each other. So we met each other 2009. Give the people a short catch-up of what you can remember of what your life was like around the time that we were meeting each other.

Matt:

I mean, we both had our own foolishness and we just put our two foolishness together, and our foolishness is each other's foolishness now.

Amena Brown:

Well, give me a little more in like, how long had you been in Atlanta at the point that we were meeting in 2009?

Matt:

First of all, let me tell y'all that this is very much like our regular conversations, where my wife is asking me some questions. And I say a little something, and she's like, "I want some more details." That's what that question was just now. How far back do you want to go?

Amena Brown:

However far back you want to go? Will it help if I answer first?

Matt:

I mean, I'm not afraid of you leading, you know what I'm saying? I do realize I'm in the, HER Living Room, so I'm going to act accordingly. So I'll say that I grew up here in Atlanta in high school, south side of Forest Park. I had been in Texas for about 10 years. Some things went really good and a really bad thing had brought me back here. Life had gotten to a rough point. So it's like I had to hit the start over button. So I came back to Atlanta and was just rebuilding my life from the ground up, which also led to some depression. And just the things that you go through when you had something going on and all of that went away. And now you don't have anything going on, and you're like, was that the end? I was just really in a status of picking up the pieces whenever we met. I remember you came and did poetry at the church I was attending. And I was like, oh cool. I went and met you at the merch table.

Amena Brown:

You did.

Matt:

And the side of town that the church was on, not a lot of cool happening on our side of town. So I was like, "Somebody, please let me know something that's going on somewhere because I got to get where it's happening at." And so I asked you if you did more stuff like this around. And you said you did. You told me of a place where you was going to be doing some poetry at. And I was like, "Cool, I'm going to be there." I also remember meeting your grandma.

Amena Brown:

My grandma was there.

Matt:

And the wild thing is there was somebody that I've known that was a part of the church that I've known since I was in high school. And that lady looked at me and said, "You should date that lady." And I remember just in the moment just being like, "Ain't no way that lady is interested in this dude right here." Life had dealt me some blows and I was just picking up the pieces. And I was like, "Man, I'm in scrub mode right now." So I didn't think it was a thing. So I'm like, "Cool, let me just go enjoy the art, make some friends."

Amena Brown:

I will say what's interesting to me and thinking about like the places we were in our life before we met each other is we both were in a situation of feeling like we were having to pick up the pieces of life. So by the time 2009 came in, and I was just talking to a friend about this because we were talking about the amount of like food that you eat when you first fall in love with someone. I was talking through with her, this exact part of our story. And so for me, I feel like my pick up the pieces was that I had started out my career full time after working in corporate for so long. And then as many of you know that have been listening to this podcast, you've heard me like make reference to this story as well, but that did not go well the first year and a half.

Amena Brown:

So by the time Matt and I are meeting each other, I'm renting a room from a friend, a room and a bathroom from a friend inside her house. I was working a customer service job at night for a while to try and get out of the debt that I ended up in from quitting corporate. So we both were in this place where our lives had not gone the way we planned and the way we wanted. And we both were in the process of rebuilding, right?

Amena Brown:

So we meet at this church. This was 2009 so MySpace was the main way, the main social media you used to communicate with someone. So when Matt was like, "Do you do other things like this in town?" I was like, "Yeah." And I always post my events on my MySpace. So he and I became MySpace friends. And then I think the next event in town I did was at the Starbucks in Conyers, Georgia. And y'all, I remember having the conversation. I remember having the conversation with you at the church that day, but I didn't feel any special feelings that day. I was just talking to you like I would talk to anybody at the table. But when we went to that Starbucks, my sister was with me, and you walked in and it just stole all the breath out my chest because you looked so good. I mean, you had like a [inaudible 00:08:14] to match your shirt that you had on. And I think you played sax because... Did you play saxophone that day or did you just stay? No, maybe you didn't.

Matt:

I think I just showed up, yeah.

Amena Brown:

But you showed up looking very nice. And also I want y'all to know that he was kind of stunting on me. So he showed up and he was like, "Yeah. No, like it's cool to be here. I can't stay long. I got another event I've got to go to." I was like, "Oh, okay. We busy. Okay. We busy. Oh."

Matt:

I was a little shifty in my younger years.

Amena Brown:

Pretty much right at that Starbucks meeting, at any time I would've gone on a date with him. If he would ask me out that day, I would have said yes. And there were subsequent. We had over the years where I was like, I would totally go out to dinner with him. And I just don't think he knows that I would go out to dinner with him.

Matt:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

So that's sort of put us in a friend zone, even though I wanted to be more than your friend.

Matt:

And I was working so hard to protect my just friend, Amena

Amena Brown:

So as I got to know Matt and found out like, oh, he can play saxophone, he DJs. And I also knew the side of town where you lived and I knew that there wasn't as much stuff to do over there. So whenever my friends would have a show or if my friends were looking for a DJ, I would tell them about Matt. And then that's sort of how we ended up developing this friendship and sort of being in the same kind of friendship circle. But that lasted us for two whole years, y'all, honestly. We spent two years of me kind of having a low key crush on him that whole entire time I was super duper attracted to him.

Matt:

Impossible. No way.

Amena Brown:

Super duper wanted to go to that dinner. I wanted us to have dinner where we could sit across from each other. And even when we did go out to eat, we had a couple of times we went out to eat just one-on-one, and he would be looking so good. Sometimes it would feel like we were in this romantic environment, but it was just homie energy.

Matt:

I mean, don't get it twisted. I mean, you was attractive from the jump, man. That's not a problem. It was just that I thought this woman was not going to be interested in this man. Impossible. I thought there was no way possible shooting out of your league. Bro, sit down.

Amena Brown:

So in our friendship, we were ending up spending more and more and more time together. In part, because I had an idea at the time as many of during this era, I was performing in mostly Christian conferences, churches, Christian spaces, mostly white. And I had kind of been pigeonholed into only doing poems one at a time. And I would get booked for these events. Sometimes it'd be like a nine session conference, but I was there all three days doing three minute poems in every session. But I had to be there for so long and I was getting paid so little.

Amena Brown:

And so a shout out to Susan Isaacs, who is a wonderful comedian and author. She and I ended up at the same event. And she told me, "You need to put what you're doing into a set of material." And the only way I could think that people would book it like that is if it had music. And since I knew that Matt was a great DJ, I asked him if he would go into "redacted" nonprofit that used to have a space where you could go there and you could pay a membership fee. In a way, it was kind of like a coworking space, but for creatives very specifically. So it had a studio in it. It had these like iMac computers and it if you were into graphic design, and so I pay the yearly, so Matt and I could go in there and build this show together.

Amena Brown:

So we started building the show probably starting at some point in 2010. And we spent about four or five months before we got the show in this good place. But imagine that every Friday or every other Friday for a few months, we were spending three to four sweaty hours together. And not the fun kind of sweaty either because the place where we recorded, the studio, not very much different from where we're recording now.

Matt:

I will say it's hot in here right now.

Amena Brown:

The studio where we were meeting, it was hot, y'all. But we would go in there, do our little work. And a part of my creative process is I need to get my little stuff out of my heart before I can start working. And so I would blow into the room every Friday and be telling him all these stories and stuff, what happened to me. Sometimes I would walk in and tell him about these dates I'd been on, and then it would come out because I felt so comfortable talking to him. And he would always say, "This is a safe space. Share whatever you want to share."

Matt:

Again, protecting my just friend, Amena.

Amena Brown:

But I would start talking about somebody I was dating, and I would immediately want to take the words back because I was like, "I really like him. And I don't want him to think that I'm talking to him about other people I date because I don't want to date him. I would much rather be dating him than most of these people." So we are having these moments in said studio place.

Matt:

Redacted Redacted.

Amena Brown:

Redacted Redacted, and get to a point where we're now finding excuses to see each other. Because now the show is finished, we don't need to really be in there, and end up kicking it one night after we went to a very bad concert, Redacted Artists.

Matt:

It's wild that a concert that didn't go so good is how we started because we've been to so many great concerts over the years. You blowing into that room and just letting out all your feelings and emotions, that was a sign of things to come but that bad concert, luckily enough, was not a sign of things that come because we've been to some great concerts together.

Amena Brown:

Amazing concerts, actually. That was a very small percentage of bad shows that we've ever been to. Okay. So I should explain that by this time we are summer of 2010, and a friend of mine had told me I should come to this Redacted concert because they thought it would be good mingling for me. And I knew that one of the artists performing there was an artist that Matt had told me about when we were building the show together. So I was like, "You should come to this show and I'll meet you over there." Well, he didn't know that I was a part of a dating program at the time, which I believe I have talked about on this podcast. But if I haven't, I was dating based on a program in a book called How to Get a Date Worth Keeping by Dr. Henry Cloud. And Dr. Henry Cloud, I know you're listening to this podcast.

Matt:

Got to be.

Amena Brown:

And I realized that now you're in a leadership mode where that's mostly what you spend your time talking about, but I just want to give a special shout out to that book you wrote, because it was very helpful to me. And it did, in a way, in a roundabout way, it did lead me to the man I was going to marry. So at the time I was on this dating program, and a part of the program was you had to meet five people that you potentially could date in a week's time. So right before I told Matt I was going to meet him at this concert, I went to a meeting of the Tall People's Club. And this is a real thing. There's an International Tall People's Club. And I found it on meetup.com. I'm not telling y'all a lie. I went with one of my girlfriends, who I was in small group with. Man, I need to reach out to her on Facebook and be like, "Girl, I really owe you some money."

Amena Brown:

But anyways, I think the women had to be above 5' 9" in order to get in. And then the men had to be over six feet in order to qualify for the Tall People's Club. So we went and y'all, you remember how when you were in elementary school, you always had at least one teacher that had vests or ties that matched the season, like had jack-o-lanterns, had candy canes, stuff like that had four leaf clovers or whatever.

Matt:

Had that Rudolph nose hanging off the sweater.

Amena Brown:

Okay, these are the people that were at the Tall People's Club. It was not Idris Elba. It was not George Clooney. It was not anyone sexy that I could think of. It was all of my former teachers, now in their fifties and sixties, that were waiting there for us. So I'm leaving that, and my friend is looking at me like, "You should go to this concert with this guy because you like him. I hope he likes you. Anything can be better than what we've encountered here today. This is terrible."

Amena Brown:

So we go to the show, the show's bad. We're leaving the show and go out to the parking lot. And I say to Matt, "I just got back from LA." I don't say to him that I was in LA thinking about you. But I just say, "I got back from LA. We should talk again about the show we build because I have some thoughts about what I want to change about it." You said, "Man, we should just do it tonight. We should go eat." And I was like, "Okay," because this was like the second time that we'd been out to eat together and like nothing of a boo nature, nothing of a romantic nature had happened. So we went to this wonderful empanada place that's closed now, sad face. Had a wonderful conversation there, but I feel like I entered that moment. I need to find out, does this man like me or not? Does he even see himself dating people or not?

Matt:

I entered this moment like, I'm about to eat some empanadas and hang with my homie. We can go laugh a little bit and go about our merry way.

Amena Brown:

So I asked him at the table if you all of your ducks were in a row, because that was a phrase Matt would always say during this time of our friendship.

Matt:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amena Brown:

He would always be like, "I'm not dating anybody until I get my ducks in a row. When I get my ducks in a row... " And I was like, man, how many ducks are there? Are they adult ducks? Are they child ducks?

Matt:

I didn't want to be hollering from the passenger side of my best friend's ride.

Amena Brown:

Is it a school of ducks? I was like, and can't we still go to dinner? Are the ducks preventing us from just going to dinner? I was very confused about the ducks. So I was like, "If you had all your ducks in a row, would you date?" And do you remember what you said?

Matt:

I was definitely afraid and that some of those fears were healthy fears because I wanted to be able to step up to the plate. I wanted to be a whole me coming into a relationship. I didn't want to be a part me and somebody had to drag the other half that I couldn't make up. I want to meet someone. I wanted to add some to somebody's life and not take away. And so I think those were some healthy fears. But I knew I had some unhealthy fears because some of the history behind that, those that don't know me, I was married once before and the marriage ended horribly, led to some rough years, which led to me being back in the Atlanta area picking up the pieces. In that conversation, thinking about these fears, I realized I had some unhealthy fears also that was like, okay, that thing happened. But that thing doesn't mark your life. You don't have to stay stuck in that life.

Matt:

By this point I had taken some years and years. I'd been through therapy and had people in my life that was helping me walk through some things. And so if I wasn't at that time then, I knew I was coming soon to where it's like, okay, it's time for you to get up and move on because some of these fears are just unhealthy.

Amena Brown:

And that helped me to be like, okay, I can ask question number two, because your answer gave me a little... I don't know if it gave me hope is the right word, but it gave me a little more courage after you were so honest with me. Then I was like, okay, boom, I can get my second question answered, which that will tell me, is this only a friendship or not?

Amena Brown:

Because the show we built, which was based on my first book, Breaking Old Rhythms, the show we built I felt had the potential to be a success, had the potential for us to be able to travel together. And I was like, we can't be traveling together and doing creative work together without me at least addressing the fact that I totally have feelings for him. So I felt like I should at least find out is he just closed off to dating in general? Is he closed off to dating me? What are the vibes? So once the question was answered, yes, if my ducks were in a row, sure, I would date. Then I was like, boom. Okay, second question. I asked you, do you have hope that God has somebody for you? And when I asked that question, y'all, it was stone quiet at the table.

Amena Brown:

And it was quiet for a long time. It was quiet for so long that it was awkward. And I was just sitting there hating the awkwardness, but also like, he's going to answer my questions. So we're just going to sit here. Do you remember being quiet that long?

Matt:

In part, I remember being like, man, I can't believe my just friend Amena getting all up in my business like this. Now that I've known you after what's about to be 10 years of marriage, it makes perfect sense as to who you are. But at that point I was like, man, my just friend who I keep talking about just wants to be my friend, that girl's not interested in me, sure is throwing some heavy questions, man, at this table. I think my answer was the honest part. But my answer also was kind of what hit me. I was having to deal with the feelings or whatever that brought up versus, again, me trying to protect my friend, Amena.

Matt:

My answer to you was that actually somebody like you gives me hope. That thought was the first thought in my mind and that like felt really strange, but it was the overwhelming thought in my mind. And again, how do I protect my just friend, Amena? I'm trying to be a safe dude friend to you. And also after what I just gone through, can I be in a relationship, you know what I'm saying, after some of the things that were said to me. Am I those things that were said to me? If so, I don't have any business being in a relationship with nobody. That place that I was at in my life, is that a good place for me to try to step up and be somebody's somebody in they life when I'm like, I don't even know if I can stand on my own two. So there was a lot of processing that happened in that moment.

Amena Brown:

So somehow y'all, we ate that food, checks got paid, and left. I don't remember to this day how all of that wrapped up. The next thing I remember is I was in the car going over the conversation we had and I was starting to feel bad that I had gotten in your business without telling you anything of my answers to the same questions. And that felt kind of like it wasn't fair to me to be asking you those things and then be like, "Well, empanadas were delicious. Goodnight. Hope you have a great one," whatever. And so I was driving home and decided to call you on the phone to be like, "Yo, I feel like I asked you all these questions. You put yourself out there to me and I'm not putting myself out there equally."

Amena Brown:

And so we kind of ended up having this conversation about... I think you had asked me why I was still single. And so I told Matt straight up that the reason why I'm single is because I don't put out. And I was like, "I'm pretty sure if I put out, I'd have a boyfriend right now. But because I don't put out, I don't have boyfriends. So that's that on that." And so we had a little laugh because it was kind of... I mean, it was true what I said in the sense of me not putting out, but we had a little laugh that that was the reason why I was still single. And so then we started talking more about that. And I think you asked me, "Well, if you were to date somebody, what would he be like?"

Amena Brown:

And I started describing all these things and then feeling so silly because they were all you. They were all things that describe you. I was like, "I can't believe he's not hearing this going like, 'Hey, that sounds a lot like me.'" And so I was like, "This is dumb." So by this time I had gotten home. And I was like, "Look, I just need to say something. Okay. We've been friends for a while."

Matt:

This is where I caught on to what we were really talking about. I was clueless. I was talking to my home girl, Amena, until this moment.

Amena Brown:

Okay. And I must have said like a few of those phrases because I was trying to get my own courage up...

Matt:

You were circling the runway.

Amena Brown:

... to just say to him like, "I like you. I would love to be more than friends with you." So it was a lot of like, this probably going to be awkward, but we're both adults, and we can take it and we can talk about it. It was a lot of that before you interrupted me.

Matt:

I remember I kind of had to do the math real quick in my brain once I was like, "Oh, this is what we're talking about. Can I do this? Can I? Should I? I'd be like, "Man, you would be dumb if you didn't at least try this thing out." I just thought you were such an incredible person. I was like, "First of all, Again, there's no way this woman should have been interested in this dude." No way. In my mind, made zero sense. But I was like, "If we here, I would be foolish not to step up to the plate." So I was like, "Hey, let me see if I can help out here." And I just told you that I really admired you. And think it was on several levels.

Amena Brown:

You said you found me attractive.

Matt:

Oh.

Amena Brown:

On several levels.

Matt:

Do, still do. That wasn't just the moment, y'all.

Amena Brown:

And I think you asked me if I have hope tonight. And you said, "I have hope because of you."

Matt:

That's right. Okay. See I got the order...

Amena Brown:

y'all, it's been 10 years. I realize some of the order of the story, we might've mixed it up, but all the facts are true.

Matt:

Let's be honest, she invited me in for this conversation knowing good and well I was going to mess up the details.

Amena Brown:

But there are some points of the story now that I'm like, "Oh no, it didn't happen that way," the order of it. I remember now that my initial question to you was about the ducks.

Matt:

Oh, yeah.

Amena Brown:

Would you date or not? And you just said, "Yeah, I would." And then my second question was, do you have hope God has somebody for you? And that's where it was silent. And that's where you talked about the fears, the unhealthy fears. But y'all, it's been 10 years. The facts be swirling around.

Matt:

And we still together.

Amena Brown:

So anyways, basically from that phone conversation, it becomes clear to you that I have feelings for you. It becomes clear to you that you're like, "I would like to enter this relationship."

Matt:

Absolutely.

Amena Brown:

I was dating a lot of scallywags casually. So I said to him, "So you want to date just me though? Just me though." Because knowing that Matt had come through a divorce, he had taken this break from a lot of things in his life while he was healing up from his divorce. So to me, it actually would have made sense if you would have said to me then, "I really want to see what's going to happen with us. I haven't been dating. I would like to also date some other people." So I was leaving you the room, but I was also trying to get some clarity because I was dating some scallywags that were totally dating other people.

Matt:

I mean in some ways I want to thank them fellows. You know what I'm saying? If they would have acted acted right, I might not be here. So thanks partner. I remember when you asked me that question. I don't know. It seemed crazy to me because it's like, okay, in my mind, you're a 10 in all regards. You know what I'm saying? What I'm going to do, be out here with somebody else being like, "I mean, she ain't cool like Amena." If I'm riding with a 10, it's not a question of if there's other 10s out there. It's like, I'm rocking with my 10 right here. You know what I'm saying? So let's see what it is and give this thing a real good shot. And plus, by this point, I was like 32, 33, maybe.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

I'd already gone through that phase where I was the scallywag. I was hard to nail down at a certain period of my life. By this point, I was already picking up a lot of messes I've made in my life. So I didn't want to make no more. You know what I'm saying? I wanted to try to give this thing the best run we could.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. So we talked on the phone until like four in the morning. It was time to go to bed, for you only a few hours away from having to take the youth group to Six Flags. I think about that all the time.

Matt:

Yeah. I was hanging out with a bunch of middle schoolers the next day at a youth group at a church that I was at, a trip to Six Flags. And it felt so crazy because I'll be on a long ride or a rollercoaster with some middle schooler. I couldn't be like, "Let me get some advice. I got this thing heavy on my mind. What y'all think?"

Amena Brown:

Oh, I got a girlfriend now. You got a girlfriend? And I'm like calling my girlfriends. And I'm like, "Do y'all know if there's an orientation for dating a good man, because I don't really know what you do when you date a good man exactly. What are the rules? What are the vibes?" So we started dating August of 2010, and I feel like that was a combination of us just finding various sundry excuses to see each other and hang out...

Matt:

Absolutely. It was ridiculous.

Amena Brown:

... and eat food together, and ate food after we ate the food together.

Matt:

Dropping off donuts at your house before I had to be at a meeting that was an hour away. I was late to every meeting.

Amena Brown:

And then I feel like pretty early on, we at least felt like this is getting serious to us. And so we did go on kind of like the meeting the family tour. I would say you had met already a lot of my friends, so we really weren't having to have that meeting. But we felt like this is serious enough that we might decide to get married. And if we do, we want to go ahead and get to our families knowing each other. So we did that. Do you remember a moment in our dating where you were like, I'm going to marry her?

Matt:

I remember the I love you thing started hitting me between the eyes a little too soon. I was like, "Nah, partner. We're not saying that just yet. We're going to be exclusive. We're going to do this thing right. But no, hit them brakes real quick." Again, just feeling like after what I had experienced, it was like, there's no need to rush this thing. I feel like you should date somebody at least 365 days, make sure there's not one day out of a year that they just worship Satan that one day. I feel like you just be around somebody all the way around the calendar. Meeting the family was the right next step. But I do remember that I love you thing. Like, I really want to say it. And I was like, "But you should not say it." By the time we just went ahead and popped off with it, I was like, "Okay, this thing is just moving fast because it's supposed to."

Amena Brown:

I think the moment for me, which is interesting because it's also connected to us meeting our families, your grandmother had a birthday. She was in her nineties and I went out of town with you and your parents to her birthday. And that was my first time being around any extended family of yours and seeing the other men in your family and how family oriented they were. And then me looking at you and thinking about what I knew of you and your character from having been your friend and now dating each other. I think that was my moment of like, I could see us be in a family, the two of us. And I think that trip was my like, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I want to marry him, and I feel like he wants to marry me too."

Matt:

Yeah. That's a big deal when you take somebody to your Mamaw's house. I'm Southern, so that was my Mamaw.

Amena Brown:

I'm going to say, after watching 90 Day Fiance, I've been watching Family or Fiance, that's a show on OWN. And I watch it all the time, and a lot of it is couples that get engaged and sometimes their families don't even know that they got engaged or they went ahead and got engaged even though their families don't really think the relationship's good. And so it makes me so glad that we went on that family tour so that we could really meet each other's people and see what the vibes were. And it also gave our families, more in particular, our parents and some of our siblings, the opportunity to get to know us versus... We'd fallen in love with each other, so when we sprang that on the family, they're just now meeting this person. It gave our families time to get to know our person and understand why we were falling in love with each other too.

Matt:

We grow in a relationship together, that also gives our family time to grow into this relationship with us.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Okay, so we started dating in August of 2010. You proposed to me on my birthday in 2011, in May. And then y'all, originally, we were going to get married in February of 2012, originally. I, for some reason had in my mind, maybe we could do a Valentine's wedding. And then I was like, "No, maybe we could do like a new year's wedding." And then I was like, "Nah." And then I was like, "I would love to have a beach wedding, but you need to do that at kind of like the off season."

Amena Brown:

So I was like, "Maybe an October beach wedding." And because Matt was a youth pastor at the time at the same church where we met, he became the youth pastor there. So by the time we were dating and about to get married, he was still the youth pastor there. And my youth pastor when I was growing up, got married when I was 15. So I got to be at the registration, guests book thing and wearing their wedding colors. And it really meant a lot to me to be in his wedding. And so I started thinking to myself, maybe we don't want to have a destination wedding because that will mean probably a lot of the students won't be able to be there. And maybe some of our family members wouldn't be able to be there. And so we decided to get married at the church.

Amena Brown:

So the same church where we met is where we also planned our wedding, planned our wedding for a Friday night. I want y'all to know that our anniversary is September 9th, 2011. I wanted our anniversary to be 9/10/11, but somebody else had already booked the church that Saturday.

Matt:

I can't believe that I didn't think of the fact that we was getting married on 9/09, which is one of my favorite drum machines. It came right after the world famous Roland 808. But the Roland 909 is an amazing drum machine. You may not have allowed it or been down for it. But man, that would've been so dope to include it coming down to out to like a...

Amena Brown:

Because I was going to ask you, what do you think you would have done thematically? If you could do the wedding all over and you could do a 909 as a part of the theme, what would you have done? Would you have wanted the cake to be like...

Matt:

Maybe if while we're doing our vows, because the 909 is like a step sequencer, right? You've got 16 steps. And as we're both adding steps or like, you be like the kick drum, like... Now I come back and I add the clap...

Amena Brown:

There would have been a 909 on stage is what you're saying.

Matt:

Yeah, yeah.

Amena Brown:

And we would have done that. Okay.

Matt:

Me, you 909, right in the middle. Nah, ring ceremony. You know that salt ceremony people be doing, and you can never take the salt out and mixed them. We done mixed up the hi-hats with the kick drums and snares and made a beat of it.

Amena Brown:

Y'all, it worked out for the best that he did not think of that 909 situation. So we got married on a Friday, and because the church was kind of far out from the city, I knew that getting married on a Friday would mean that only people who really loved us would brave Atlanta traffic to drive outside of the city to that wedding. What was your favorite moment from our wedding?

Matt:

Oh, it has to be when you first entered the room. Dear, God. I mean, people all day was coming up to me like, "Aw man, you in trouble. We saw... oh man." And so in my mind, I was psyching myself up like, "You got it. Don't pass out. Don't pass out." I just remember that moment you walked in the room and I was like, "Wow." Yeah, exclusive. Yeah, that thing I said? Yeah, exclusive.

Amena Brown:

Exclusive.

Matt:

A world premier. You walked in that door, I'll never forget when they presented us, me and you, hand-in-hand, walking out and just feeling like the world just began. Today is day one. It was just such an electric atmosphere and just being like, yo, me and her, here we go.

Amena Brown:

Oh yes. That was such a wonderful moment. Y'all, I'm not going to lie about it. I'm sure we're going to post pictures of this, but in my wedding dress, I definitely just feel like it was a lot of boobie. I remember there was just breast coming out of the top of that dress. And even when I look back on our wedding video, I'm just like, "Wow, guys. You really went for it, Amena. You really went for it. Just let the ta-tas just sit up and out there." But I was like, "I'm getting married."

Matt:

That was God-given. You know what I mean?

Amena Brown:

I had to let it ride. I will say, as a side note, before I say my favorite moment of our wedding, I remember that day I took a nap. And it's always a glorious sign to me that I'm having a wonderful day, that a wonderful thing is happening to me if I'm able to take a nap in the middle of the day. And that's how at peace I felt on our wedding day. I wasn't a big wedding planner girl. I just wasn't really into that. I was into marrying him more than I was all the particulars to go with the wedding. But the fact that I took a nap in the middle of that day said to me, I really had nothing on my mind that I felt I needed to worry about. There was nothing about that decision that I was wringing my hands over.

Amena Brown:

I had really said yes to marrying you, even before you proposed to me. So to me, that moment was like, now it's a formality to say something I've already said in my heart and you've already said in your heart. But my favorite moment of our wedding was our wedding dance. And our song was Unforgettable, the version where Natalie Cole did the duet with her dad. But it was like technology-wise, she went back because she was not able to sing it with him in that way before he died. But some of y'all old heads listening will remember that music video. And it's like, she's there and this old footage of Nat king Cole in black and white. And I just always loved that song and loved that version in particular. But I loved the words to it.

Amena Brown:

And of course, I'm also a big watcher of Married at First Sight. And of course, these are strangers at their weddings. And sometimes this happens even when it's not a stranger getting married, but I'm sure some of you have been to weddings where the people do their dance, but they kind of rush it off so they can hurry up and like get finished. And that moment was the first time that I felt like that moment was just for us. Like, who cares if it's awkward for the people who have nothing to do, but watch us dance with each other.

Matt:

Just got lost.

Amena Brown:

Like, who cares? But I loved laughing and joking with you and just soaking in that moment. That was my favorite moment, hands down.

Matt:

Yeah, beautiful moment.

Amena Brown:

So now here we are, babe. It's 10 years for us. I still are just like... I mean, for all the things we made it through and achieved and survived, the 10 years seems right. But then sometimes it just seems like, 10 years? It just doesn't seem like it's been that exact amount of time.

Matt:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

So what would you say it's like now being married 10 years later? Now that you think about us on that wedding day, what are your vibes now that you're like, "Wow, we've been married 10 years." What do you think?

Matt:

I still feel like I'm wanting to protect my friend, Amena, sometimes. Like, "Hey man, get it right. Your friend Amena watching." I feel like my goal is still the same. I want to add to your life and not take away. But I also will say that I've learned a part of being together with somebody is sometimes they've got to be able to give to you too. So I mean, sometimes you will take. Sometimes may not measure up. Sometimes I may miss it or sometimes I may be insufficient, and that's okay too. You know what I'm saying?

Matt:

That doesn't make me a scrub. It doesn't mean that this woman should not be with this man, like I thought originally. It's a beautiful thing to find yourself in a place where you can let your guard down and make mistakes, do something foolish. I'm not talking about malicious or evil or something, but just live life and be a person. I feel like I've learned things about you that I did not know 10 years ago. There's some shockers, man. You keep bringing up these reality TV shows. I never in a million years would have guessed that Amena, oh, she's really into that. Okay, cool, cool, cool.

Amena Brown:

I do. It's very enjoyable.

Matt:

I also, I mean, I learned this while we were dating, I realized that I like raps more than you do.

Amena Brown:

It's true. It's true.

Matt:

Because we were riding in the car, it was one of the things I learned early on. You were like, "Hey, we listening to hip hop all the time. Can we listen to something else?" But I feel like that's the thing is like I was trying to rebuild and repair and sometimes you just need somebody that really loves you that just lets you just be.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

And I appreciate that.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

I appreciate that about you. My friend, Amena.

Amena Brown:

I think the thing that when people ask me like, "Yo, y'all about to celebrate 10 years. How does it feel?" The first thing that comes to my mind is even after all this time, I still really, really like you.

Matt:

Oh, no doubt. I really like you.

Amena Brown:

Really, really like you. You're the first person I want to talk to when I get up in the morning.

Matt:

I can't wait for you to wake up.

Amena Brown:

You're the last person I want to talk to before I go to bed. If something bad happens, you're the first person I want to call. If something good happens, you're the first person I want to call. I love that we can have fun no matter where we are. I mean, we've literally traveled the world together. We had fun in a podunk town in the middle of Kentucky. We had fun at this amazing four-star lodge in the middle of Botswana. I mean, we've had some life that we've lived. And whether we had a little bit or we had a lot, I just really enjoy you as a person. I'm like, that's my person. That's the person that hears about it when something makes me want to cry. I have sat down on many couches with you now with a box of tissues. And you're the person I go out to ice cream with to celebrate or whatever, when something really good happens.

Amena Brown:

And that's a big blessing to me to be married to you 10 years and be like, "I love him. I'm in love with him, but I just like him. I like kicking it with him." And I think that is this beautiful thing about us having had that time as friends, that I feel like we have the wonderful combination of being able to say we are friends to each other and that we are lovers.

Matt:

Hey.

Amena Brown:

Hey. And that we have the ability to also be business partners and co-own our business together and do all that. So people have asked us, when we haven't seen people in a while, and they're like, "How are y'all doing? Through the pandemic I mean, and I know y'all work together and you had to shelter in place together," like that. They have sort of a pitiful look on their faces when they say it. And I'm like, I mean, for us, it kind of felt like we'd been quarantined together for, since we've been working together full time...

Matt:

Air ports, hotel rooms, yeah.

Amena Brown:

This has been our life.

Matt:

Roaming around some city that we have no idea where we are, yeah.

Amena Brown:

We had to kind of build a routine there. I do feel like one of the things, and I guess I'll close with this question, babe, because I would love to hear from you what are the things you feel like you've learned and being married to me for 10 years. I feel like one thing that I really wanted to say to some of my friends that they really wanted to get married and I did too. And I remember after I got married, because I was single through all of my twenties, so after I got married, it was sort of like I wanted to go back to my friends and tell them that I think marriage can be wonderful. But I think whether or not your marriage is wonderful is mostly dependent upon the person that you're married to and the person you are in the marriage. It's not the institution itself that's so great are so amazing to me.

Amena Brown:

I'm having a very specific, wonderful experience because I'm married to you. I think one of my other lessons that I had to learn from earlier in our marriage is giving my husband space to do things the way he does them, even if that is different for me. I remember like when we would come off the road, my idea of a day off coming off the road because I'm introverted is like, I just want to lay down. I want to veg out and watch TV. I don't want to have to talk to anybody extra because I have to talk to a bunch of strangers. So I just want to binge watch some TV and eat food and chill. And we would get home and you would be like, I got to get in here and make this music because I got some ideas. I'd be like, "You need to lay down. You need to come in here and watch TV with me."

Amena Brown:

And I had to learn to let you do what you need to do, that your process is different from mine. And that's not a bad thing, but let you have the space you need to be who you are and to be yourself. And that's very important to me, but I had to learn that, y'all. It took me a couple of years before I was like, "Oh yeah, no, cool. You go make music. I'll watch Grey's Anatomy."

Matt:

It took me a couple of years to learn to speak up and say, "Hey, I think I need to get this thing off my chest."

Amena Brown:

Yeah. What are some other things you would say you feel like you've learned in 10 years being married?

Matt:

It's the old, I think, African proverb of, "if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together." I say that that has shown up to be true in every aspect of our life together. Whether it be in our business, there was sometimes where your thing was rocking and rolling and I was setting up t-shirts at your merch booth. Or we came off the road and had some health situations going on and then DJing picked up and took off. And then now we're at a pretty fun intersection where I get to see my friend Amena winning and I'm getting to get some wins too. And I love that. First of all, I just love seeing my friend Amena win. I do believe that we've gone farther because we were together.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

I'll say like, even in our personal life, some of the difficult things we've had to walk through, some of the tough things that we've had to figure out how to talk about, how, as an interracial couple, how do we talk about race?

Amena Brown:

Right.

Matt:

I definitely will say that I've grown and learned things that had I not had been married to you, I wouldn't have been in those rooms to hear those things, or I wouldn't have access to that information maybe. I should have found it out another way, but I was very privileged to be in some rooms and hear things and get some education. So I'm a better man because of being with you. I think it goes back to that moment of, do we want to do this exclusively? Well, is there other things out there?

Matt:

Yeah, but the idea of building a foundation and having a place to put your feet down. And you got two sets of feet running at this world, whether it be business, whether it be personal, whether it be, I got something going on that, man, I just can't wrap my brain around or something that's emotionally causing me some stress, man is great to have another set of eyes, another set of ears, somebody who sees the world differently than I see things. And then as we've gone on, us merging our lives together. We're not the same person by age by any [crosstalk 00:48:39].

Amena Brown:

Right. For sure, for sure.

Matt:

We're different. You know what I'm saying?

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

But there's a lot of things where we're really well to same on. Like, we're not big yellers, neither one of us. You know what I'm saying? We have the carefulest fights you ever heard in your life, y'all. I'm like, "Well, see, I just want to make sure that what you're hearing me say is that... "

Amena Brown:

There's a lot of sighing, a lot of huffs.

Matt:

I just want to be careful that I'm not, and we are... So I'm thankful for those things. You know what I'm saying? But there are some things that's like how we do, like how we have our money together and how we do our bank accounts and how we do our bills, that's not saying anybody else to do that. But these two people, we got together and figured it out.

Matt:

And I will say one thing I feel like I've learned from you is watching you just do the work. You've done the internal work, probably more than anybody I've ever witnessed in my life, and maybe cause I've had a front row seat to some rough times. Watching you do that ongoing work takes me back to Matt who didn't want to be a scrub in this relationship and be like, "Well, I need to do that work too because I want to be a whole me. So that way you can be a whole you and not have to drag me." It's one thing if you find yourself at a moment of exhaustion and somebody's there to help carry you. Everybody needs that sometimes. You know what I'm saying? But it's another thing if somebody has to drag you because you ain't getting up, putting your feet to the ground, doing what you need to do. So I'll say those are some things I've learned is that, man, together, yo, we went for it. And it's so much fun, man.

Amena Brown:

It's way more fun.

Matt:

I still would rather not just be your friend, but...

Amena Brown:

Right, because there's some benefits.

Matt:

I'm glad I didn't have to lose my friend.

Amena Brown:

Yeah.

Matt:

Because, yo, I really like you as a friend, man, as a person. You're my homie for real.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. That's true. I do feel like that. And I feel having had a business, I guess, or having been in my career before we met and got married, being married and having walked through a lot of the career things that I had to walk through, you were such a soft place for me, a place to land. You are the first ear of everything. I mean, we're probably each other's first ear for anything that we create make.

Matt:

Yo, check this out.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. And so I really do love that for us. And I feel like there's no way you can stand at the altar at your wedding and know all the things that are going to face you as a couple. There's no way you can know. And maybe if you knew some of those things, you'd be like, no or whatever. Not that you wouldn't marry the person, but you'd be like, "We don't want that. We don't want to go to that."

Matt:

I mean, I can think of a time in my life...

Amena Brown:

That's right. Fair, fair, but not this wedding, at least.

Matt:

Not that 909.

Amena Brown:

Yeah. Okay, please. But there's no way for you to know. Even when I look at our wedding pictures, even though it was just 10 years ago, it feels like you're staring at two kids still. It's like, you're looking at the picture. These two people have no idea that they're going to get booked in Vegas and have to fly into Vegas for a gig. And the gig is on February 15th, but the planners are going to be really pressed about you coming in for a meeting on the 14th, only for you to randomly get these very amazing tickets to see The Beatles Love on Valentine's Day in Vegas. Right?

Amena Brown:

You can't tell those two people that you can't tell those two people all of the losses and hard stuff that they'll go through in life. There's no way that those two people can really be prepared for all they're going to experience, great and not so great. But at 10 years to be like, "I'm glad you were my person that was with me, whatever the times were." And that also gives me a lot of hopefulness and encouragement about the future, that there's a lot more life for us to live.

Matt:

Absolutely.

Amena Brown:

I always tell people, we don't have children, but we're a family, the two of us.

Matt:

Yeah.

Amena Brown:

And we still have a lot of dreams out there. And we still have a lot of fun adventures that we have had a chance to take yet. And I love that for our forties, and I love that for the next decades of us being married.

Matt:

I love you, girl.

Amena Brown:

I love you. Happy anniversary, boo. Her with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.