Welcome to Ideas Over Drinks! For the past seven months or so, I’ve been writing this newsletter about a number of things I’m in the process of trying to learn about: cocktails, books, parenting, antiracism, feminism—just to name a few. This week, I’m up to something a little different. I’m sharing an interview I did with the writer and educator Ellen Hagan, who teaches at DreamYard, an antiracist-based social justice education program in the Bronx.
I came to know Ellen’s work by reading her recently-published novel in verse, Reckless, Glorious, Girl. It’s a collection of first-person poems that tell the story of Beatrice Miller, a young girl who has a lot of burning questions in the summer before she starts seventh grade. Since the book is set in Ellen’s hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky, it made perfect sense for us to have a bourbon together as we talked. FaceTime is a sad excuse for a bar, but it got the job done. She was drinking Rowan’s Creek and I was drinking Rittenhouse.
What follows is a portion of our conversation, edited for clarity. (Translation: I took out all the parts where I was rambling—in part because of the bourbon, but mainly because I just tend to ramble.) I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed talking to Ellen.
Jason Basa Nemec: You live and work in New York, is that right?
Ellen Hagan: I work in the Bronx, but I live in Washington Heights, which is just about 10 minutes over the bridge to the Bronx. I've been in New York for almost 20 years. I moved here in 2001. But I go back and forth a lot to Kentucky. We have a house in Kentucky where my husband's family lives so both of our families are still in Kentucky. But yeah, we've been here for a long time.
JBN: You’re a person of many talents! Poet, artist, educator, Kentuckian, New Yorker… What am I missing? I know these are all just labels and there's so much more behind them, but how do you identify yourself, especially with regard to what you're passionate about?
EH: Thank you. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last little bit. At the core, I'm trying to be a community builder. I think that's how I was raised. My family was very much that family where the doors were always open. My parents had parties, and my friends were over at all times. I think the best part of being an artist for me has been the people that I know, the community of artists that are around me. I think if I didn't have that, I wouldn't want to create as much.
Growing up, I had amazing mentors and teachers. When I was seventeen, I went to a program called the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts. Some of my teachers that year were Kelly Norman Ellis and Crystal Wilkinson and Frank X Walker, and they were all Black writers from Appalachia who called themselves the Affrilachian Poets. Because when you looked up Appalachian in the dictionary, it said, “white residents of the Appalachian Mountains.” And they were like, “There's tons of writers of color. We exist. We're here and we're making art.” I think about them, writing themselves into existence like that. It was very much, at seventeen, a moment where I realized that I have to stay true to my voice. Even if my voice is awkward, and even if I am both proud and kind of ashamed of where I come from, because Kentucky is complicated.
JBN: I want to talk a bit about Reckless, Glorious, Girl. The voice of your seventh-grade narrator, Beatrice, to me, is one of those voices I just want to hang out with. Once I got on her wavelength, so to speak, I felt like I could keep listening to her all day. So anyway, this feels like a big question, but I'll just throw it out there: what does this book mean to you?
EH: I have such a heart for middle school students. They're figuring out who they are, and they’re both overconfident and embarrassed. And nervous, and awkward. So I wanted this book to be a place for a kid to be like, “Oh, okay, I feel that too.” To have that feeling of wanting to stay a kid—wanting to play with your toys, or your dolls or trucks or whatever kind of toy you played with as a child, but also feeling like, “I want to run with the cool kids,” or “I want to be grown.”
JBN: I’ve been thinking about what Beatrice is struggling with in terms of the whole “not-enough-ness” of coming of age. I’m thinking about it in part because I have two young daughters, and the older one, even though she's a long way from seventh grade where Beatrice is at, she's already big into comparison. She’s big into what she doesn't have. My wife and I were like, where did this come from? One day it wasn't there and now it's always there. I think you’re exploring this in the book, especially in all the parts about friendship, but what else do you say directly to young girls who are struggling with that sense of not being enough?
EH: I think at the core of raising young people, it's about showing all the examples of how to be powerful and comfortable in your skin, in your body, in your identity, who you are. And that means constant continual conversations. It means talking to kids, non stop, about what they see on TV, and how they see things represented. I think, as two young girls who are mixed race, I'm not sure how exactly they're going to present the world, I definitely talk to them about the roots of white supremacy. I talk to my seven-year-old and my ten-year-old about what the history looks like. The uncomfortableness of it. That goes with everything, you know? With body image. With race. With class. There’s no subject that’s off limits in our house, no matter how uncomfortable it can be.
JBN: Yes. I hear that. I’m going to keep you on the advice seat here for a minute if you don’t mind. Because this was this book was so illuminating for me as a man, as a father of two young girls. Not only in thinking about where they're going to get to, as they get older, but also because for me, as a pretty sheltered young boy, I didn't have to consider the body image issues that women and young girls go through. I didn’t think about what fitting in is like for a girl and how it's different for a boy. And so I'm wondering what you'd say to dads who might be feeling uneasy or unsteady about some of those conversations that that might come up.
EH: Be unafraid! And remember that books and advice from others are your best friends. I think there's a real power in just saying, This is uncomfortable for me, but I'm here for it, and I'm good to do it. And I might use some other things to help me through it. I think it's the same conversation around race where it's like, I know this is uncomfortable. I know this is going to be hard to do it but if I don't do it, then what happens around this very racist culture? What happens if I don't have any of the words, so it's that same thing again? Am I just going to stay silent? Or not be part of the conversation? No. I gotta be in there.
JBN: I want to wrap up by bringing it back to bourbon. There’s a section in the book where Beatrice talks about how people underestimate Kentuckians, or have all these preconceived notions about them. But there’s all this culture around bourbon, and the people who make it. What do you want people to know about bourbon, that they might not know about that culture?
EH: There’s a pride. In Bardstown, everybody was somehow connected to distilleries or to somebody who worked in a distillery. Listen, I know alcohol is complicated, and people have complicated relationships to alcohol. I know that, but there's something about bourbon and Bardstown, Kentucky that feels like home. It feels like family and your people. And when your people come over, everybody’s having a drink, or everybody's having food. It goes back to that same open door policy. Everybody's invited, and what are you drinking?
Everybody’s invited. What are you drinking?
What a beautiful sentiment. Don’t be surprised if I get it printed in big letters on a T-shirt and then show up at your house and simply point to my torso. Until then, as always, I honestly do want to know what you’re drinking these days, and/or what spirits you want to learn more about. Chances are, I want to learn more about them too. Drop me a line and let me know!
Tremendous thanks to Ellen Hagan for answering all my questions with such wonderful energy, and for allowing me to share part of our conversation here with you. Please check out Ellen’s website, where you can find links to her books, projects, and various other performances.
I’ll catch all y’all subscribers next week, and the whole crew the week after that. This month, 20% of the profits from full subscriptions to Ideas Over Drinks are going to Legacy Of Hope, an Indigenous organization in Canada working to create education and awareness about the intergenerational effects of the Canadian Residential School System, including the removal of generations of Indigenous children from their families.
Until then, all my best to you and yours,
J.