Recorded on Tuesday, February 17, 2026

TRANSCRIPT

Shayla Smith ’20 Welcome, everyone. It's great to have you with us tonight. Thank you for joining us for the SwatTalk: “Poetry, Black Mental Health and Therapy as Reparations”, featuring Morgan Parker, acclaimed author and assistant professor of English literature at Swarthmore in conversation with Adam Dalva, president of the National Book Critics Circle. My name is Shayla Smith. I'm from the class of 2020, and I'll be your introductory host tonight. SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, which is the leadership body of the Swarthmore Alumni Association. Tonight's talk is part of Black History Month and is presented in partnership with the Alumni Council and Swarthmore Black Alumni Network, both of which I'm a proud member.

For those of you who are new to SwatTalks, or for our regulars who just need a refresher, this is how tonight's talk will run. For the first half hour or so, Morgan and Adam will be engaged in discussion for the last half hour. They will take audience questions throughout the talk. You may pose questions using the Q&A feature at the bottom of Zoom. Please be sure to include your name and class here. If you are a student or your connection to the Swarthmore community. Also, we do record these sessions, so if you would like to rewatch at any point, please visit the SwatTalks page on the Swarthmore College website in a few weeks. So I'd now like to introduce Adam Dalva from the class of 2008.

Adam's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. He is the president of the National Book Critics Circle. Adam teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and is a contributing editor of the Yale Review. We're so happy to have you with us tonight, Adam, and I'll hand it over to you now.

Adam Dalva ’08 Amazing. Well, I'm so delighted to be virtually here and to be here with one of not just one of my favorite writers, but, this is kind of a full circle moment for us, Morgan, because, I went to Swarthmore, as you know, and I was in the halls with Peter Schmidt, who still there, and Phil Weinstein and Patty White, and Morgan and I went to grad school together at NYU. I won't say how long ago, a couple of years ago.

Morgan Parker Enough years. I know you pretty well [laughs]

Adam Dalva ’08 So this is kind of a beautiful double, I don't know, a concentric circle moment. I think I might just give a bit of your bio just to make sure our attendees know it. And then maybe our first question can touch on that bio. So Morgan works in basically every genre and is one of my favorite writers and all three genres. As a poet, she's the author of Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce and Magical Negro, which is a book I adore, and you can tell I adore it because it won our National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award a few years ago. Author of a beautiful Y.A. novel called Who Put This Song On? And an author most recently of this brilliant book of nonfiction. I would say it's like an essay collection cum memoir, maybe You Get What You Pay For. Each of these books demonstrates, I think, a unified presence of an author at work. The books deal with questions of therapy, as our title talks about tonight, questions of pop culture, questions of the black body and contemporary American society. But throughout they also have a magnificent lyric line. And I think when we go to Morgan Parker's work, we go to hear sounds we don't hear from any other contemporary American writer. So, Morgan, thank you for joining me tonight.

Morgan Parker Thank you. It's honestly so great to engage with this part of Swarthmore. And it's so great to talk to you always. Yeah, looking forward to this conversation.

Adam Dalva ’08 Let's do it. We were saying last time we talked, we were on a boat in Paris. So these are the two best places to talk. Swarthmore and a boat.

Morgan Parker Exactly. Yeah.

Adam Dalva ’08 So I do want to start with a question. The three kind of titles tonight. The first one was poetry, and you gave a great answer in the New York Times, I think a couple of years ago. And your By The Book interview, when you were thinking about the way the different genres you work in influenced one another, you said about poetry specifically that when you write nonfiction, you have a lyric and sensory quality coming from your poetry. So I wonder if maybe thinking about how poetry impacts prose, which I think you've asked all the time, but then also, maybe now that you're writing poetry, how your prose has also impacted your poetry.

Morgan Parker Yeah. Honestly, you know, one thing I always say and have said to you and I always say to my students is the best prose writers, write poetry, and if not, they read it voraciously. I think, you know, it has all the things, and first and foremost, it engages all the senses and was an oral tradition. So, you know, first in the intro class, the first week is just talking about sound, because that's what's underneath poetry. And that's what makes good prose really sing, is that attention to sound and then also like being concise and trying to be, you know, very precise about what you're saying, whittling it down to what's most important. Honing a voice like these are the sorts of things, techniques and poetry that really carried on to make my prose tighter. And when I think about writing prose, I'm using all the techniques that I'm bringing from poetry. I mean, little things, anaphora, rhythm and even bigger things like how I might structure an essay feels kind of similar to structuring a poem more so than structuring a novel.

Adam Dalva ’08 I was noticing that you use, I mean, your poetry is sort of legendarily great with the cadence of repetition, but I was noticing that your nonfiction too, seems to not go in fear of repetition. Repeated motifs, sometimes repeated sound. I'm interested in sort of repetition as an alternative to white space that operates in the same as similar functions. So I'm wondering about how that kind of plays a part in what you were working on.

Morgan Parker Yeah. You know, I went back and forth on how much repetition would be in the essays. But in the end, it was a question of form and content. So much of what I was discussing in the book of essays was patterns and cycles and how things come back around. So it felt and also just like the feeling of being a black American is feeling repetition all the time and sometimes unchanged repetition, sometimes things are a little bit transformed, but usually just kind of the same thing. And there's a lot of like, déja vu that I'm trying to illuminate in the book. So it felt important to kind of almost assault the reader with repetition in that same way. And that was something that I did in Magical Negro that felt, it felt pertinent to the content in this book as well. And, it was a way also of providing cohesion when I wanted to be sort of disparate about the sorts of topics that I was talking about. But, connect them. And so much of the book is just like these things are connected. And sometimes the best way to show that is just to connect things through sound.

Adam Dalva ’08 I love that, and I was thinking about how sound kind of functions like an intrusive thought in the book as well. For example, there's this stunning, devastating recurrent motif of the slave ship and ancestral trauma kind of in various situations in your life. Feeling the memory of that in your body, you know, sometimes being preoccupied by thoughts and it often almost like, interrupts the essay. And so you have the feeling sometimes when I'm reading an essay collection or some of the essays have been published elsewhere, you do kind of just think, oh, this is just a writer publishing a bunch of essays and slapping them together that is like, not this. Actually, that motif adds up as you read the book. And it's also present in your poetry. But I'm wondering, when did it become sort of a central motif of this project? Because I think it feeds into everything we're here to talk about tonight.

Morgan Parker Yeah. I mean, actually pretty early on, I think. There was a moment when the book was just kind of being thought of when I thought about calling it Everything is a Slave Ship, and my agent was kind of into that also.

Adam Dalva ’08 Great title.

Morgan Parker I know. That was always a little bit of like a subtitle for the project. You know, I knew that it was going to be about therapy and reparations, but I also knew that it was going to be about the slave ship and the feeling of the slave ship repeating. But I wasn't sure how that would fit in. I wasn't sure if it would be one essay. In the end, it's sort of, as you said, it kind of turned into something that moved in and out of several of the essays and became the sort of motif. And that happened later on in the writing process. But so much of putting this book together because of all the connections I was trying to make, the ordering of it was really difficult and because, you know, there's no chronology when you're talking about in the ancestral trauma. Like, it's not linear, you know, so I kind of didn't. And in the end, I start with, you know, my birth because I was just like, where even to begin?

Adam Dalva ’08 I love that beginning. It's like, here we go.

Morgan Parker I mean, it's kind of like, well, because it's a false beginning, right? Like, let me be deceptively simple about where my story begins the day of my birth, but actually it begins several hundred years before that. And I don't know, that's a hard argument to make, you know? So it was something that had to be built on through the book. because it was also, you know, there's the kind of sensory trigger of an encounter with contemporary slave ship structures. There's the sensory memory of water. There is the idea of feeling hostage. There's the idea of black people as currency, you know, so there were a lot of different directions that I wanted to take, and I didn't feel like it would serve any of the ideas to just smush them all into one essay. And so, so much of this book was breaking down a lot of the themes and to really small pieces and kind of moving them around.

Adam Dalva ’08 The title without the subtitle is actually kind of related because, if you're reading this book and I hope everyone in the audience does, you're reading about Jay-Z's Big Pimpin and then you're like, what's going on here? The title sort of comes from a quote where he's, I think breaking down the music video and then you, you walk us sort of back around to the slave ship. And I had this feeling of reading, like, almost like a boxer punching me at an unexpected angle. And I think your poetry also does that a lot. You know, the Beyoncé book, I think has such a great title, but that title misleads readers sometimes and thinking like,"Yay!” And then they're like, “Oh no!”

Morgan Parker It's just a sad lady.

Adam Dalva ’08 Like actually pop culture is harrowing in your work, and it's a way to think about deeper questions. And I wonder about, like in your poetry as well I think it's not a high/low thing. And I think sometimes people who deal with pop culture are like, put in that box. It's really like a high/high thing where you're thinking, this is part of society, particularly with the black body. This has been like the currency of the black body for hundreds of years. It's like entertainment. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about that.

Morgan Parker Yeah. It's interesting. The Jay-Z essay came not it wasn't the last one, but it came kind of late in the writing, and I thought that it would be after the other slave ship stuff. But ended up kind of being a lead in, instead of an arrival. But it is a little bit like where I started - of like watching this music video and, and literally saying out loud to myself everything as a slave ship, you know, what? How is this not a slave ship? It's like, you know, and that's just how my mind works. And so the book was like, literally trying to help the readers see how I see, you know, my experience is being able to see the first few minutes of this video and immediately having these kinds of ancestral memories and seeing the overlap, like, can't unsee the overlap. So I think, I don't know, it just felt really delicate and like, painstaking to try to bring the reader into seeing that in that particular way.

But yeah, like, I mean, entertainment and pop culture and really, I mean, one of the themes that I dig into a lot and I think it gets a little bit buried in the shininess of pop culture, but really what I'm interested in is performance. Just generally, you know, obviously on stages, but also just like interpersonally and with ourselves. So I'm interested in all aspects of that. And I think it's easy especially to think about black womanhood on display, thinking about, black celebrity and how it's consumed. It's easy to kind of use that as an example and kind of like, a lead in to talk about bigger questions of performativity.

Adam Dalva ’08 Yeah. It's so present in your work. I'm thinking about how your work separates, I think you call it the capital MP, Morgan Parker, who is like your stage self, the self who reads poems that we all love, and the lowercase MP, who is a friend of mine, perhaps. And then there's all those sticky questions of who are you on a signing line? Who are you after reading, who are you in a reading? If you're in a room with an all white audience and a black person has just been murdered? And how do you mitigate those two identities as a public writer?

Morgan Parker Yeah. I mean, there's so many questions; in this book in particular, I think I was thinking a lot more about questions of, like, safety. And when we feel safe enough or allowed enough to not perform. So much of the performance that enters my earlier work is about maybe putting on a front a little bit about faking it til you make it a lot about this kind of seduction, so that I can then go and punch you in the face, with reality. You know, it was kind of used in that particular way. But I think as, you know, and the capital and lowercase that came from therapy sessions. So that's really how I'm thinking about, you know, a public self versus a private self. That's part of my own kind of developmental journey. But I think it's particularly relevant as a black woman because, so much of what I like thinking about in my work is, preconceptions and like, what sorts of expectations that we're born into and have to kind of, negotiate without even realizing, and wanting to confront a reader with whatever their preconceived notions might be. And kind of throw that askew a little bit. So, I don't know, I think in this book, it felt more pertinent to ask, why are we performing and not just to look good, but often just to feel safe, and to feel allowed to be in a particular room. So, you know, obviously that brought up questions of what does it look like to be a lowercase and to be not performing. And, in what spaces do I feel like I can do that and how can we create more of that basically.

Adam Dalva ’08 It's interesting that, you know, you're talking both here and in the book, with therapy as a potential site for performance, particularly for, for a black woman. There's one moment where you talk about how you've been in therapy for long enough, and you like the therapist that you begin to have this impulse to lie. And for me, my impulse to lie in therapy was all at the beginning. And I sort of eventually was like, I actually was just like, after two years, I was like, I have been lying the whole time. And he just wrote it down and we kept going. So, I'm wondering the book, there's a great interview with you, I think it's with Tiffany Troy in the LARB, where she talks about you basically say the therapy scenes are the most memoir things you write, and that they provide a sort of like bone, sort of, structure for the book. It's a book with a lot of therapists, and part of it is the quest to say, like, as a black woman what therapist can I find comfort with? Yes, it is so interesting and I've I've never read a book that at once takes on questions of therapy, doesn't disparage therapy, doesn't push therapy. It just sort of presents it as a narrative medium.

Morgan Parker Yeah. And that was another thing that happened just in the development of the writing. At one point I had just like one big essay that was, you know, in sections and was like all the different therapists, and decided then to kind of break it up. And that felt like a way to provide a little bit of direction and like something for readers to hold on to so that I could go way back in time and also go to a Jay-Z video. And also, you know, it allowed me to move a little bit more wildly because I could always like, return to nNo, it's just me in the therapist's office”. And it felt important to bring every discussion back to that, because that's a big part of the larger argument of the book is, like, kind of the inevitability of me in the therapist's office for one reason or another, whether it's like singleness or slave ships or objectification of women in a Jay-Z video, like, all of it is just sending me right back to a therapist's office. So you know, then the question becomes, if me being in therapy is inevitable in this society, you know, if it's a society that will always lead me to therapy, then how can we build therapy that considers that, you know what I mean? And that takes that into account and is modeled for this. If we know that the world we're in is only conducive to sending black people to therapy, where it makes the most sense that we would have, kind of all of these neuroses, then how can we kind of build an industry around that instead of, you know, away from it.

Adam Dalva ’08 And at least I actually have two questions. I'm going to start with maybe the scenic one and then bridge out. So let's talk when you talk to a friend you really care about about their nonfiction, you're like, you know what part I loved the really horrible part. Like, because, you know, if you told me, I think I actually remember this, but there's a scene, like hearing about it and you're like, oh my God, that's terrible, but then when I read about it, I was like, ooh, delicious. And it's like a scene where you do the exit interview with the therapist, and it's so related to what you're talking about, I think. You can set it up better than me, but you fire or you part way, I don't even know what you do with a therapist. But like you part ways and then she asked you to come in one last time. So it's like the therapist can't even let you go without projecting guilt about race onto you.

Morgan Parker Exactly like I, there was still labor for me to do, even though I just wanted to be, like, rid of it. And I mean, and that's an interesting essay, too. I worked on that one a lot, just because there was so much anger that it was hard to write in a clear headed way without just, like, being super like, bitter and sarcastic. But like, this is a white woman therapist who is working in the middle of Manhattan, and she just didn't know anything. She didn't know anything. Like I mentioned double consciousness and Dubois. And she was like, who? Double what? And I don't know, I mean, I'm just like, it's 2012, like, you know. And on top of that, at no point in our time together did she go home and Google it, you know, and that I think that for me is where I was most offended, is that, not it's one thing, okay, you don't get my references, but you're not interested enough. And you don't see it as your job, but, like, I'm paying you, like, don't you think that it should be your job to figure out what I'm talking about all the time? That just felt so offensive, and I felt so invisible that it just really sent me into questioning therapy, which has been an important part of my mental health since I was a teen. You know, so to really feel like, no, this is something that I need, but I can't get a version of it that affirms me like, that was a scary thing. And then working on the book and seeing just decades of work being done by black psychiatrists to outline these specific problems and potential solutions to them. And, all of these things happening way before I even entered one therapist's office, right? So just the kind of disservice that's been done, all these people could have read those books, you know, before, like, damaging me and then like, that is so it's ridiculous to me. So, yeah, I think part of writing the book was uncovering a lot of that history and recognizing how egregious it was that the doctors that were supposedly caring for me we're not even interested in kind of getting to know what work was out there already, and instead asking me what they should do differently, which is so much labor. I don't go to therapy to try to break down, you know, AfAm lit. That's ridiculous. But, you know, I mean, and that's again, leads me to these ideas of performance, right? Here I am again in therapy, having to perform as, like, an educator instead of being able to just cry or talk about the stuff that's bothering me.

Adam Dalva ’08 You can't be free if you're explaining everything

Morgan Parker Exactly.

Adam Dalva ’08 The second kind of part of that question, and I actually think there's so many crafts also things we could talk about what you said, like the restraint you deal with it with in the book, the kind of unwillingness to engage in snark, the turn to kind of friends as support. There's a million craft questions I could ask, but I do want to, maybe, instead branch first out to, there's a brilliant essay in the book. I'm just going to make sure of the title Reparations or Strategies for Boat Repair, where you bring the threads we've been talking about actually all three of them together, and you say essentially that the way to repair this is to rethink a sort of therapeutic reparation structure. And after that is introduced in the book, kind of everything after that, it's another kind of intrusive thought, but it's almost like a positive, intrusive thought. You'll be reading other essays and you'll be like, by the way, like therapy, you should be reparations. And again, but instead of this, like negative intrusion, it turned her into a real call for arms that I was quite moved by.

Morgan Parker Yeah. I mean, it's not like a super positive book and it's also, you know, it doesn't presume to, like, answer anything. But I did want to approach a thesis and circle some kind of a new idea and make a claim. And really, the project was really like making this argument for therapy as reparations and using myself as kind of, an example or kind of like test subject and thinking about, I mean, it really came from me understanding how much of my own neuroses started in therapy and are due to white supremacist norms. And realizing how much weight was lifted from me in realizing that and just wanting that for everyone else. It's wild how much that I swallowed as my own problems and and not just as my own problems, but my own to fix as well. So this idea that by just having the right sort of support and investigating our unconscious and our behaviors and what's bothering us, honestly, would really, I mean, it would change so much. And that's the sort of speculative imagining that I wanted to do. I'm not, you know, I don't know, I'm not a doctor and I'm also not a politician, whatever. But it felt important to kind of make this argument. There are so many arguments for reparations that just aren't going to solve what I think at least for me, has been the root issue. So even thinking about money, which I would love tons of money, but like that's not going to fix it. And so yeah, it was a challenge to myself to really think about, like, where is the damage, you know? And so naming the damage as psychological felt just important to kind of like speak that and so that really,

Adam Dalva ’08 You know, naming and showing are such, like, literary concepts. And I was thinking, I've been seeing the same therapist for 16 years and there's basically no evidence that he's like, he's going to be like, hey, we cured you. Like, you know, it's time to go. Like it's never going to happen. And I think when I was like 24, I would have thought like the goal was to be cured. And instead what I realized that the goal is luxuries of not just space, but of telling, for lack of a better word, writers have these venues to tell things in, but a lot of people, I think, don't. And I think the role of the therapist as a way to narratize some form of narratology of the self, but also of the events of the week, like there's something very much associated with writing in there.

Morgan Parker Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think so much of our psychological and probably physical damages in the society are like what is unspoken and what is unsaid and not being able to, like, locate how we feel about things. Kind of like pushing past initial responses and trying to say, “Oh, I feel good about this or bad about this”, and not really investigating the ins and outs of just like how we're responding to everyday stimuli. And I think especially for black folks and especially for women, black women, I think there's so much that we have to ignore or swallow or table or just like, I mean, there's so many things in the course of a day where I'm like, I'll get to that eventually, but definitely not right now, you know? And we have to do that, we just have to. But that has to end at some point, otherwise we will get sick. And so making the space for that is, is not indulgent. It's honestly like self-preservation.

Adam Dalva ’08 Absolutely. I'm going to maybe selfishly ask 1 or 2 more questions, and then I'm going to turn to the Q&A. There aren't so many questions in the Q&A yet. Swatties I know you're good for it, you know, put some questions down there. I want to loop us all the way back to where we started in the wee hours of the morning when this talk started. Your time with genre and as you were talking about the self, I was thinking about the ways that identity changes between genres. So you have a poetic eye. I think there's always the assumption with the poetic eye is you, I think your poetry plays with that assumption, like, a lot in ways I really enjoy. There's the nonfiction, we both write like essays where, for lack of a better word, we do stuff. We're not essaysists, I think who just sit in our rooms, like, you go to the Cosby trial, you go to a plantation, and then after you go to the plantation, you eat Popeye's across the street while you're looking at the plantation. And I heard Morgan read that at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and the French audience did not know what to do with it [laughs]. Like they laughed and then they were like, “Mon dieu” [laughs].

Morgan Parker But the black Americans in the audience were cackling [laughs]

Adam Dalva ’08 Me too. I was having a great time. But then I'm also thinking about YA and why YA is, I think, about a kind of emotional vulnerability where you're telling maybe other young black girls reading your book like, this is me and this can be you. So there's like an empathetic connection. So you have more first persons than anyone I know. It's kind of getting at here. And I love to talk with someone who writes in multiple genres about the ways that the first person has performed across her work.

Morgan Parker You know, it's kind of hard. Like, it took me a minute to figure out what my nonfiction narrator was like. There's an impulse to approach an essay in, like, an academic sense, you know, especially when there's, like, research involved and things like that. So, you know, I knew I didn't want, like, dry academic essays, but I also did want to make arguments. And so I was really thinking about how to balance that and also where to put voice, like, the poetic voice. And, you know, often in poems I do that, man, I missed enjambment. I really missed enjambment, in terms of rhythm. And I mean, I use them for like, punch lines. So I really missed that sort of thing, in building a kind of attitude and voice. Yeah, it took me some time, but I think that's why the essays feel lyrical is because I was kind of using that part of my poetic voice to find the nonfiction voice, like starting with lyric and then figuring out, like what the attitude around that was.

For the YA that was kind of the easiest one because I went back to my journals and typed them up and forced myself to be in that same voice. You know, there was evidence of it. I grew it up a little bit, but, you know, having to like, check myself against my teen self helped me to kind of get back in that mindset and voice. But that's really the thing is that in my poems, I can change  ‘I’ 60 times in a book of poetry if I want to, but in a nonfiction book, certainly in the novel, you can't do that as much. So it was really thinking about how to have a narrator that could travel and shift a little bit, but also be certain enough that the reader could kind of, like, follow it. And I couldn't do as much play with the ‘I’ and the perception and who is it. It just wasn't appropriate for that genre. So it was more about figuring out how to use the tools that I'm used to using in poetry and fitting them into prose in that way.

Adam Dalva ’08 And I also call my nonfiction like character a ‘character’, which I think confuses people. But like, it is a character, right?

Morgan Parker It is. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And it’s funny when I work with students, nonfiction students, I'm always like, well, your main character and they're like, ‘huh?’ But you have to think of it that way if you don't, you can't write half of what you're going to write. You know, like you kind of have to approach. Also, how then are you going to get the speaker in a scene, right? Like that's usually why I'm making that argument to my students is because they don't describe the speaker at all like they're like, but you know what I look like. I'm like, ‘huh?’

Adam Dalva ’08 I always try to tell them, I don't know if you'll understand this completely, I'm like, my character is 5% dumber than I am, but my writing is 5% smarter than I am. And I think that makes total sense to me. But it's hard to explain maybe if you don't do it much.

Morgan Parker I don't know. It's important to think about the person walking around in your work as a separate being, right? Because we're writing that person, but we're showing what they're seeing. There's a little bit of translation that has to happen.

Adam Dalva ’08 Oh, absolutely. Okay. I'm going to go to the Q&A. There's some great questions. There could be even more great questions. You can tell I'm a professor too. So if there were even more questions I would be great. But I'm going to start by reading a question from Marsha Richardson. No one except Marsha followed the suggestion to put their class year in it. So, Marsha, I'm starting with you as a reward because you're the only person who identified themselves properly. Marsha Richardson, class of 92 and the Philadelphia region SBA and liaison. This is a quote now “My question centers around the balance between self-disclosure/healing process and cultural critique. How do you personally navigate your own self-care while writing deeply emotional, impactful work? You alluded to therapy. How has your writing evolved during your own personal self actualizing journey? I hope this makes sense”.

Morgan Parker Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. My poetry and my own mental health journey are so interconnected at this point. I often talk about how sometimes I'll be working on something and realize that I can't finish it until I've had a couple more therapy sessions. And sometimes I'm writing something that leads me into a ‘wow, I have to talk about this in therapy’. So they really interact with each other and play off of each other in what I think is a really important way, especially in terms of like, just articulating the problem. Like I said, sometimes, a lot of my book of essays I wouldn't have been able to write had I not done that sort of investigation, you know, firsthand. So, yeah, the writing has changed, over time because I realize more about myself and more about the way that I interact with the world. So it's not that I, you know, have completely changed my mind about anything, but I think it leads to different kinds of confidences and certainties in them. And I do think there's a little bit more self-care inside of the writing, because I recognize it as necessary to the writing in a way that I maybe didn't when I first started.

Adam Dalva ’08 Are you less confident in some things than when you first started?

Morgan Parker Yes, yes. But, but not my themes that I'm like, that I've been digging into for a while. And I think I have a better idea of what's important to me to write about and what I maybe thought was important, but is really only important for other people and not for me.

Adam Dalva ’08 I love it. I'm going to ask another question. I'm a sucker for this question from Nanti A. I can't resist this question: “What are some writing lessons you find yourself imparting to Swarthmore students most?” What a great question.

Morgan Parker Oh my gosh. So good. So many things. Read your stuff out loud as you're writing it, underline bold. Revise. That's like something that you don't really think about. I think as an undergrad. I tell my students, I remember early this semester, I told some students that I worked on a poem for like seven years, and their faces were, like they just didn't. They couldn't.

Adam Dalva ’08 They were 11 when you started.

Morgan Parker I know, but I think that sometimes, young writers don't understand how much of writing is revision. So that's like a big one that I, I end up talking a lot about, that I'm reading aloud. Those are like the big lessons. And then also, not to bullshit. I mean, you know, that's my whole thing is like, you know, often in workshops, all I'm asking is like ‘But what are you really trying to say? But what do you mean? Why don't you just say the thing?’ And you can always go backwards and make it prettier later, but, like, just say what you mean. I think it's a good place to start as any.

Adam Dalva ’08 Can I jump in with, like, a mild quick follow up before I go to another great question. Sometimes I think also when I teach undergrads, I'm like, what are the strengths of the student writer that vanish as they become more polished?

Morgan Parker Yes, this is a good one because like I said, I was reading some of my undergrad poems on campus tonight and thinking about what remained and what went away. There's an there's, like, an inhibition that I was accessing. But it was also because I, you know, when I was taking these classes, I was like, who cares about poetry? So that's like a little bit of it, I think, I have a little bit more, it's corny, but I have more reverence for the form and before I kind of was like, I hate this, and I'm annoyed that I have to write a poem to them so I'm going to write it about being hungover or whatever. And so there's a little bit of, there was just like a little, there's more freedom, I guess. And, also like, not knowing exactly what was good or not good. There was so much, you know, as I'm going back into writing poetry after writing prose books, the one thing I keep coming back to is when I started writing poetry, it was all about playing. And so I'm really trying to remind myself of that as I'm reentering poems is just this idea that it's rooted in play and word play in, invention of sounds. And for me, it's rooted in just making jokes that I could read at parties. So, you know, if that's where the spark was for me, that's like a place to go back to. And yeah, I think professionalizing anything takes a lot of play out of it. So that's something that I'm consciously trying to re-invite into my practice.

Adam Dalva ’08 You made a great segue to this question from Peter Seganthaler, class of 83/84. Not sure what that means, so to find out one day. Peter says: “A lovely conversation”. Thank you. That's my favorite part. “I wonder how your teaching life affects your writing life? Do you consciously or unconsciously run ideas or phrases or scenarios by students? To see how the audience reacts?”

Morgan Parker Probably. I'm not sure. I know I've done this with grad students for sure. It really does help me to talk out, especially with the essays. It was useful for me to talk about the ideas that were swirling in my head. So if anyone had happy hour with me, they had a conversation about a slave ship. Like, that's just how it was going.

Adam Dalva ’08 I wasn't shocked when it came up in the book. [laughs]

Morgan Parker And I often bring my work, I've really been trying to do that, with the Swarthmore students also, just kind of bring them into my writing process. I fell off a little bit last semester, but I've been trying to write. My students have to write a poem every week, I'm trying to write a poem every week. Sometimes doing the prompts I'm behind this week I have to write a villanelle with them. But it's really useful to remember to not be so precious about every single poem. I'm telling them - it's just a draft, so I have to, you know, heed that as well and just write a draft and be producing, and try out different prompts just for fun. So that is something that I'm, I don't know, we'll see kind of like how that affects my writing at large. But so far the idea of writing alongside students has been just really useful in terms of, I don't know about the quality of the writing, but just in terms of centering, production and trying, you know, that idea of if I'm going to encourage them to just try and fail, then I also have to do that. Which again, is something that I think often gets lost when it's like, well, I have a contract, an agent, and, you know, they're waiting for an actual good book. So, you know, why am I writing this crap?

Adam Dalva ’08 Have you talked to my agent? [laughs]. Yeah, agents. You know, you actually kind of answered Valerie's question, she asked a question that I really enjoyed, about, like, playfulness in the classroom and encouraging play. Do you find that's an improv thing for you as a teacher or, like, they need a little play, right now?

Morgan Parker Sometimes, yeah. But I also have been trying, you know, before this job, it had been kind of a minute since I taught undergrads, and I had mostly been teaching grad students, which is just a different thing. And so one thing that I've been trying to incorporate into class is just more like, more moving around and more like hands on stuff, like, let's just do this writing right now. It's too cold right now, but later in the semester, they have to go outside and, you know, get a bunch of names from all those little signs on all the plants and use that in a poem.

Adam Dalva ’08 You make me homesick. I got to come visit.

Morgan Parker It’s going to be really cute. I mean, for me, poetry is, I know everyone talks about writing as a solitary thing, but it isn't for me. It's always been about exchange and performance. Not necessarily on stages, but just like reading my poems for friends. And it's always been about interaction and collaboration. So that's something that I feel really passionate about bringing into the classroom and trying to show the students that poetry can be that and it doesn't have to be this weird thing that you're just doing in your room. Yesterday three students told the class that they had shared the reading assignments with their friends and that they were kind of like, oh, well, I was talking about this poem with my friend and we read it out loud in the dorm, and that just really delighted me. Like, that's the sort of thing that I'm  just trying to bring poetry into the world and, you know, trying to get the students to bring it into their everyday lives and think about how their everyday lives can be elevated into poetry.

Adam Dalva ’08 Oh, I love that. And I actually segways a bit back to your own work from a question from Elizabeth Nelson, class of 1987. Hi Elizabeth. “In the face of a traumatizing society, do you believe the ongoing project comes down to self-care? Self-care very broadly and richly? Maybe therapy, but also self-empowerment, finding friends and a community that gets you writing political action, honoring your body, etc.”

Morgan Parker Yeah, I mean, it has to come from the inside engine at that point, right? And I think that so much of what I've been writing about is how we're not getting it from the outside, like the outside is hostile. So how can we keep that reaffirming engine going, especially when you don't have enough serotonin or whatever. So yeah, therapy is part of that, taking meds is part of that, being accountable to friends is part of that, having people check on me as part of that, making art as part of that, helping students make art, you know. Anything that reaffirms who I am, reminds me who I am and like, why I'm here, is sustaining to me. And I think we have to start with what sustains us individually before we can even think about taking any other kind of actions.

Adam Dalva ’08 Yeah, writing alone seems impossible, especially now. And that actually feeds into, nowness feeds into a question from Marsha that I think is both an emotional and a craft question. This is a question that I think is hard to answer, but I’d be curious what your answer would be. “How do you avoid romanticizing pain and vulnerability while honoring its reality?”

Morgan Parker This is a good one that I think about a lot. Because I think, to be honest, there is a desire for that pain to be romanticized. I think too much of the reading public wants my black pain. It's something that I think about a lot. I think with Magical Negro especially, is something that I meditated on as I was writing and as I was just kind of like bearing witness to my own pain and thinking about, like, who is this for, right? At what point does it cross the line from healing into just opening a wound for a bunch of white people to gaze into as if under glass, you know? So for me, it really becomes a question of, yeah, like purpose and what am I getting from this? And what might others like me get from it? Rather than I want to be seen by a bunch of people who are not conditioned to see me anyway, you know? So it is inviting questions of audience that we don't always think about. And yeah, sometimes, like marketing and things like that. I'm very involved in a way that editors don't always love, with like everything. I mean, jacket, copy and the wording around this book and around Therapy as Reparations and even Magical Negro. It's all really important to me. I try to avoid that sort of romanticism, especially romanticism of black pain and thinking about, I mean, I even talk about a little bit I talk about this a of this idea of like black girl magic and black excellence and how that can sometimes even like dehumanize to the point of what I think, like, almost like what about just like regular black, you know, like, can't we just be regular? And isn't that something to celebrate also? So really kind of, yeah, I guess reframing the goal like. For me, I'm usually invoking pain and reflecting it to bear witness on my own behalf, right? And not to bear witness in order to self-exoticize. But it really has to do with, I think, like how the thing is marketed, how it moves through the world. Who gets to read it, you know. So I think a lot about encountering different audiences that's really important to me. I really enjoy hugging other black girls on book tours. That feels really important to finishing the book cycle, right? I don't know, just, like, knowing who and what I'm writing for, what the what I want the purpose to be. And, knowing that I'm not trying to make anyone feel better except for myself and people like me, I think that's really what it is.

Adam Dalva ’08 Yeah, that seems like a way to, well I'm being greedy, I'm just gonna make a ten second thing. I think that's an antidote to parasociality, right? Which is such a problem for writers these days. If you're saying I'm in a community and I'm doing it for people like me, then this like social media parasociality problem changes, right?

Morgan Parker Right.

Adam Dalva ’08 Okay, I'm going to do something moderate or cunning. I'm going to merge four questions into two questions so people can be heard. One is a sort of like an oppositional question about therapy. Karen Gillan or Jillian, apologies, class of 71 asked: “If you've never been in therapy, what would work one understand about this book?”. You know, because the therapy is present and then another one kid of oppositional question that's very detailed about therapy from Leila Perez Kobo, daughter of an alum. I don't know if they let us have children. “Decolonizing therapy in a therapeutic experience is so deeply important, as you've highlighted the role of therapist, client relationship between races is so important to understanding how medical support, care, and mental health needs should be approached. However, as we've mentioned, with therapeutic research comes the consequence of furthering the labor of people of color and marginalized black individuals to explain their experience to majority groups. Do you believe that therapy can ever be a space where performance is truly exempt?”

Morgan Parker You know, I don't know, but I don't know that, social life is an area where there can be no performance. Like, I really am interested in that question. But the more I think about it, the less I can identify moments in just any day where I'm not performing, whether it be for someone else or myself, right? So I love the idea. But I wonder if we are so predisposed to performance, even unconscious performance, that it's, like, not even possible? I don't know, I would love to imagine it. But I guess maybe I'm positing that that is unnecessary, you know, that or that isn't necessary to invite honesty and truth into the space. For those who have not been to therapy, you know, the first therapist that we encounter is my high school therapist. And, you know, the first memoir, Morgan, that we meet is a teen. So it kind of starts from a place of and literally I say, like, what even do you talk about in therapy? I had no, I think I said it's like Frazier that was my association with therapy. Like that's it. I didn't know  what are you supposed to say? How does someone who speaks first, you know, what am I allowed to say to this white adult. So really, the book doesn't require any extra knowledge. If folks have been to therapy, they might have their own associations that they make. But really, the book is like, really just describing my experience in it, which I think has been like, I've talked to a couple folks who have read it who are therapists and psychologists and it's interesting for them because it's not the way that they think about therapy or white friends who have gone to therapy and had totally different experiences. So, yeah, having your own kind of understanding of what therapy is for you isn't necessarily going to help reading about my experience with therapy. So I really tried to paint the whole picture necessary.

Adam Dalva ’08 Oh, I love that. So I'm going to close, there's like a two part, this is a very Swarthmore question. I think it's a nice one actually. I'm actually curious to hear the answer to the second one. The first question was specifically about a writer, Claudia Rankine, and relationships between your work and hers. Which I'm also curious about, and that was from John Goodman, class of 60. And then let's segue from that to Windsor Jordan, class of 07: “What have you read recently that has inspired you?”

Morgan Parker Okay. Claudia Rankin's work is important to me. I mean specifically her work on the racial imaginary has been really interesting. Yeah, I haven't directly engaged with it in my work, but it feels important to be writing alongside her and, as contemporaries. Glad her voice is in the mix. And I think Citizen especially really allowed for a lot of other voices to be heard in terms of speaking about microaggressions and giving audiences a way to understand microaggressions and read about them and, yeah, shout out to Claudia. We love her.

Adam Dalva ’08 And what lately have you loved? Or what should people read? It doesn't have to be lately. I just want to know what we should read.

Morgan Parker Oh, my gosh, so much stuff. Well, right now I'm reading, because I'm teaching it to my students next week, and she's visiting my class. Michelle Peñalosa’s All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems. It's really good. She is a young Filipino poet that I know and it's her second book. Really excellent writing about language, ancestry, motherhood. Really great, but I'm rereading that in advance of talking with my students about it.

Adam Dalva ’08 Lucky students.

Morgan Parker They are. They don't even really know. [laughs]

Adam Dalva ’08 They never do. But they'll figure it out later. Lucky me too. This hour flew by, so I hope everyone watching, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. We put my dog to sleep, but everyone else I think enjoyed it. But thank you Morgan. I had a wonderful, wonderful time

Morgan Parker Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate everyone being here.

Adam Dalva ’08 I'll send you some snarky follow up texts right after we're done.

Morgan Parker Great. Can't wait.

Adam Dalva ’08 Thank you. And thank you everybody for watching.