GRANVILLE, Ohio – As jet planes criss-crossed the country at 30,000 feet above the Village of Granville this week, passengers with laptops tapped away at spreadsheets, replied to emails, dozed off.
If they happened to look out the window, some of those flying from coast to coast might have thought of Ohio as flyover country – not important, and, if you’re from Ohio, a place to leave for more important places.
But on the ground, in a small-town church gymnasium, a MacArthur fellow and a Pulitzer Prize winner were busy dispelling that myth.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a nationally recognized poet, essayist and the current Nan Nowik Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Denison. Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer-winning columnist, author and a professor of practice in the Journalism Department at Denison.
He lives in Columbus. She lives in Cleveland and, having grown up not far from Cleveland in Ashtabula, considers it her home.
They had a conversation in front of a packed house, exploring the writing life – and how it flourishes and how they flourish in Ohio. The event Tuesday evening at the Granville Center for the Arts was sponsored by the arts center, the United Church of Granville, and Denison University.
“I used to get pretty weary of the question, why I stayed in Ohio, but I have an easy out because I’m married to someone who has to live in Ohio. Do you get asked that question?” Schultz asked Abdurraqib.
A lot, he said, and he bristles at it.
“It’s sort of a microaggression in a way,” he said. “It’s almost a capitalist mentality of ‘how can we extract talent to places on the coast where there are more eyes and visibility?’ They are asking it as if my staying in a place has to do with my own lack of imagination rather than theirs.”
Columbus is home, he said: “It’s where all the people I love are – also where my house is.”
He said he can do everything he wants to do from there – write, sip coffee at his favorite shops, run and spend time with family and friends. “There’s nothing that I want to achieve that can’t be achieved from my home,” he said.
Abdurraqib said there’s a visibility that comes with people in Columbus knowing who he is. People want to talk, and he wants to talk with them.
“I don’t want to be one of those people who lives in a place but isn’t present in it,” he said.
Schultz said she was once told by a fellow journalist that “if you stay in Cleveland, your career will go nowhere. It made me angry.”
It also helped motivate her to prove them wrong.
“There’s lots to explain about Ohio, and, as a columnist, I’m happy to do that,” she said.
Schultz asked Abdurraqib how he strikes “a balance between the writer who must produce and the desire to be in the world?”
In short, he said, one way to do that is to be more interested in others than they are in you. That was something he learned from his mentor, longtime Village Voice music critic Greg Tate, a Dayton native who died in 2021.
“My writing practice echoes into my life, and my life into my writing,” Abdurraqib said.
And he said he writes because he enjoys it, not because it’s a job or he feels compelled to write.
“Writing cannot for me be displeasing,” he said. “Everything in my life, at this point in my life, has to point me toward some level of fulfillment, of refueling.”
Schultz said she, too, derives joy from writing.
“I read something recently – it comes from Buddhism – that everything is meaningful; everything has meaning, and it’s up to us to find that meaning,” Schultz said.
Then she sees the note attached to her computer: “No whining on the yacht.” A friend gave Schultz that line to remind her that she has it pretty darn good, Schultz said.
That’s part of the goal in reporting, she said, and writing is as important to her as food and water. But she acknowledged that sometimes, as deadlines approach or editors are barking, it can feel like work. And she might even be tempted to complain, she said.
“Writing is never going to be work in the way my parents worked,” she said, describing how her father, a utility worker, carried an 11-pound wrench all day most days while doing his job.
“I’m not in a position to complain about it,” she said, adding that “if I’m not writing, I’m not feeding my soul; something’s missing.”
Schultz complimented Abdurraqib on the diversity of his writing – from poetry to books such as “A Little Devil in America,” which is a National Book Award finalist that the Minneapolis Star Tribune described as a genre-bending “masterpiece” that explores Black art, music and culture.
And a children’s book, “Sing, Aretha, Sing,” about Aretha Franklin, her song “Respect,” and the Civil Rights movement.
He said he wrote the children’s book because he loves Aretha Franklin, and because there aren’t enough books for young, Black children. As a child, he said, he saw few Black characters in the books he found on the shelves at school. One he remembers is John Henry, who worked himself to death building a railroad – “and died horrifically.”
“To fall in love with Aretha Franklin at a young age was transformative,” he said, and he wanted to share that with children.
After both authors read some of their recent work, Schultz asked Abdurraqib about the process of revision and editing.
He said that, for example, if he had walked past a series of mirrors in his house before he left for Granville that night, he might have worn different clothing.
“Revision includes reading my words aloud,” he said. “Editing is a series of reflections.”
“Part of reading anything out loud is to find the soft landings, or the struggles,” he said.
During a question and answer session at the end of the conversation, a young woman from Newark told Schultz and Abdurraqib she struggled with self-doubt and finding the courage to share her writing with others.
Schultz said, “I act brave and hope the courage will come.”
She also said that she doesn’t allow others to define her. She said she lives by the words of the late poet Lucille Clifton: “What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.”