Highlights - JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

"So you're afraid to change cause you don't want people to call you strange. So I sort of get that. But I grew up in a very different situation. I'm actually always surprised that I'm even in communication with my parents at all. I didn't think anybody in my family would want to have anything to do with me cause that was the message I got from the world when I was a kid, that people do not want to have anything to do with queer people other than queer people. That was what I understood, that queer people themselves didn't even want to have anything to do with one another. And so I was putting myself in training, you know, from the age when I figured out that I was into guys, which was very young. When I was in elementary school, I was in training for the day I leave my parents' house, they find out I'm gay and never speak to me again. Now, that's not how things went, but if you have that idea, if you already have the idea that everyone in your life is going to reject you, then that makes it easier to write your trauma because you don't think you have anything to lose. And part of our fear about writing that which is intimate or personal or traumatic has to do with the fact that we are afraid that, yeah, I'll have the good piece of writing, but I lose this really wonderful relationship in my real life, and I don't want to lose my relationships. Moving forward in time, I think it's different for me now. And I think it's easier for me to write into a kind of risk because I have trained myself to a point where I don't think about that risk as I am writing. I put myself in a position where I only have to think about that risk once I am at a point in a draft. And by that time the poem is so good, I don't care about that relationship. But in the beginning, my goal is lines. Oh, that sounds good! Oh, that sounds good. Oh, this is interesting. Oh, I might be able to use this piece. If you take things down to the word, to the fragment, to the line, in some cases, to the sentence, to the paragraph, and you start putting things together, then you can begin to put them together because they go together, not cause they're about you in any particular way."