Prompt to Page, Ep. 51: Dorian Hairston === Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Dorian Hairston. Dorian is a poet, educator, and former college athlete from Lexington, Kentucky. His first collection of poetry, Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow, explores the life and legacy of Josh Gibson, the greatest catcher to play the game of baseball. He is an Affrilachian poet, and his work has appeared in Anthology of Appalachian Writers and Black Bone: 25 years of the Appalachian Poets. While he enjoys reading and writing poetry, what he loves most is cooking for his family, playing some good music, and dancing often. Welcome, Dorian. Thanks for [00:01:00] joining us on Prompt to Page. Dorian: Thank you for having me, and thank you for that lovely introduction. Carrie: Absolutely. So I read that you first learned about Josh Gibson in your high school library. Can you tell us about that initial inspiration? Dorian: Absolutely. So, I was at Tates Creek High School. This would've been probably the late winter, early spring of 2012, which was the year I graduated high school. And my high school English teacher, Phyllis Schlich, I was doing an independent study with her. And Frank had just, Frank X Walker had just released Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, and my independent study was to do a collection of poems about the integration of baseball. So it was originally Jackie Robinson, and then the poems were, they weren't good. And she let me know, she let me know that, and she felt that the voice that I was trying to write in folks already knew so much about that I was having to do a lot of work as the poet, and [00:02:00] it wasn't landing well. So then she recommended that I go try to find some lesser known players and I stumbled across Josh Gibson and, you know, his wife passed away giving birth to a set of twins around the same age that I was as I was reading about his life and legacy. And I just started writing the first set of poems and never stopped. Carrie: Yeah. So that was a, that was a lucky prompt, right? [Laughs] Dorian: Right. Yeah. And what I really loved about, and what I love about persona poetry is that when you're doing historical poetry in the form of persona work, coming up with prompts is a lot easier in my opinion, because you just have to place these voices in the moment and figure out what it is that they would say as opposed to finding some poem in the ether somewhere. Carrie: Yeah, I think that is one of the things that I like about [00:03:00] historical poetry as well. Dorian: Right. Carrie: And, or even just writing from series that the series or the personas, like you said, becomes the prompt. Dorian: Right. Carrie: Did you do other research as you were writing the book? Dorian: In terms of like, for the book itself, or was I doing other research outside of the book at the same time? Carrie: No, for the book itself. Yeah. Dorian: Yeah, so I didn't, I didn't stop in high school. I went to the University of Kentucky, got a bachelor's in English with a minor in African American Studies, and then I got my MFA there as well. And the entire time that I was in school in those two spots, I was also doing research, and that included a trip to the Negro League Baseball Museum. There's a couple of poems in the collection that were written right after my visit there or even during my visit. Also, I would count any of the time that I spent playing or coaching baseball as research as well, especially on the road. And that is kind of what research looked like. [00:04:00] And, it was about a 10 year process. Carrie: Yeah. So I know from my own experience of writing based on historical figures that my projects took a long time, too, and I think sometimes people are surprised by how long it takes to write and synthesize and all of that stuff. Plus, you know, like you, I have a full-time job. Dorian: Right. Carrie: So, and you were going to school and all of that stuff. What advice would you give to other writers who are thinking about taking on a project like that or who are in the midst of working on one? Dorian: I would say give yourself time to complete the project. And what I mean by that is, from what I've seen, again, this is my only collection of poetry to this point in my writing career, but I started noticing that folks were getting a little impatient. They wanted, they were like, all right, the book's ready. Come on. It's gotta come [00:05:00] out. It's gotta come out. And I was hearing that for about five years. And, I think this is a really, a really well-rounded collection. I'm a little biased, but I think part of what made this so well-rounded is that I gave it time to develop. I didn't rush it. And projects like this do take longer. Carrie: Mm-hmm. And there's, you know, maybe a maturity that had to happen as well. Dorian: Absolutely. Carrie: You started this in high school. Dorian: I mean, I've known my wife the entire time that I've been writing this. However, we were only married for the last four or five years of this project. I did not have kids when I started this project. Like there was, well, I didn't own a home. I didn't have a career, any of that stuff. I did notice that as I was working on this project, these life events started changing some of the poems that I'd already written, and I thought that they were completed. It was like, well, now that I'm a dad, I should probably say this [00:06:00] differently because I think Josh would say this differently. Because he too was a dad of a boy and a girl, like Carrie: Right. Dorian: stuff like that. Carrie: Yeah. So, other than the prompt of the project, do you use prompts in your writing other than that? Dorian: Yes. I play a lot with time. You know, the collection isn't written in a linear fashion. Some poems happen early on in Josh's life, but end up late in the text. And then there are poems that are written well after kind of the peak or height of his career that, that appear early on. So there's actually a couple where characters actually say that they're out, they exist outside of time. So I like playing with time and what time travel looks like. Can characters jump in and out? Do they have to be metaphysical in order to do that? That's one thing that I really enjoy. I don't know that that's necessarily a [00:07:00] prompt, but I like to try to force myself to mess with time and mess with tense inside of the prompt. And then another one that I really like to play with is writing the same poem from different points of view. So I usually focus on an image and then, like, say that I write to an emotion through that image. What happens if someone stands on the other side of the pond and what do they see? Or, what happens to somebody who is on the other end of the phone receiving the phone call or making it if someone was on the opposite end the first time I wrote the poem? If that makes sense. Carrie: Yeah. I think that's maybe a technique that people think of more as fiction, but certainly poetry and persona poetry, you can use that effectively as well. Dorian: Yeah. I'm thinking specifically of, there's a poem where I knew that I needed to tell [00:08:00] the story of Josh's children entering the world. Of course his wife died in childbirth. So I was trying to figure out how do I tell this story. There were six different drafts from six different characters until I finally settled on Josh Gibson Jr. is the one that needs to tell this story and the way that he tells it. But this, you know, giving myself the time and space and opportunity to write all of those different poems to finally land on what I think was the right choice as a process. Carrie: And what made you, how did you decide which was the right point of view in that case? Dorian: His was the only one I could finish. I kept on getting stuck on all the other ones. At that point, 'cause that was one of the last poems that I wrote, or one of the later poems that I wrote. At that point, I felt like I had developed all of the characters' voices. Josh Gibson Jr. was the only one that could finish [00:09:00] that thought. The other characters kind of felt like they shut down in a way. They did not--there were certain things they didn't wanna say. And this was one of those where they were just too uncomfortable to say anything. And even Josh Gibson Jr. in the text is too, but it's a dream for him or rather a nightmare. Carrie: So that gives him some distance, I guess, from it. Yeah. Dorian: Which I could have just, to psychoanalyze myself, could have just been the poet not wanting to go there and trying to distance himself, but Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. Well. Yeah. [Both laugh] Dorian: Guilty. Carrie: That certainly happens to me a lot too. Dorian: Yeah. Carrie: So are there other prompts that you'd like to share with listeners? Favorite prompts? Dorian: One that I find myself thinking of a lot lately, and I teach high school English. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Dorian: [00:10:00] And I teach a creative writing class, and one of the ones that I've been thinking a lot about in our current environment is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and I ask my students why does it sing? And I mean, we get at the end of the poem why the caged bird sings, but I challenge them to find some other way to communicate that freedom that one can experience even while caged, what does that look like? How can one think of freedom and imagine freedom and why does someone who has nothing else going for them still choose with all of their might to sing? How can you capture that in a poem? That's been one that I've been, you know, trying to, [00:11:00] trying to explore lately for myself, both on and off the page 'cause it's hard. Carrie: Absolutely. [Both laugh] It's a difficult--I mean, that's always a difficult topic, but especially now, I think. Dorian: Right. Carrie: So what kind of things are your students coming up with with that prompt? Dorian: Most of it involves singing in rooms. They, they like, they really like to close the door and just sing their favorite songs, and write poetry about it. Hopefully I can get them to open that door and go out into the world and place the characters in their poetry or in their fiction, and for some of them, really powerful nonfiction, in other spaces that allow for them to interact with unique and interesting folks. Because we're a social species. Like, I need more than just you by yourself. Carrie: Right. Dorian: We need to be, now more than ever, [00:12:00] interacting with each other, face to face, IRL. Carrie: Yeah. Although we're not doing that right now for this podcast. [Both laugh] But-- Dorian: Do as I say, not as I do. Carrie: [Laughs] Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting prompt to consider at this moment. Well, do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? Dorian: I think a lot of what I've been trying to get across to my students and has, you know, of course, been impacting my own work. Whatever I'm doing in the classroom, I find shows up in my work is, don't be boring. You know, I teach high school. I'm constantly trying to figure out, am I giving feedback to a human being or am I giving feedback to an AI that stole this work from a human being? Carrie: Yeah. [00:13:00] Dorian: And, I feel like I can, I can at least tell at the moment. That could change in the future. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Dorian: But the most interesting stuff that I'm reading from my students, are students who take that to heart. Like they really pride themselves on spending time writing their own stuff and being interesting, not being boring. And I don't know what the future for, the species or AI or what any of that stuff looks like, but if we can just find ways as artists to be interesting, be fresh and be new with our language. Find that spot where the poem lives and let it develop for you, because it will. And then, if we can do that, we give ourselves a fighting chance at allowing love to blossom in our lives and surviving whatever we must, et cetera, et cetera. So just don't be boring, be [00:14:00] interesting, be fresh, be new. Carrie: Yeah, that's a good thought for all of us to keep in mind. Thanks so much for joining us, Dorian. We really appreciate it. Dorian: Thank you for having me. It has been a pleasure.