Intro: 
Welcome to Ritual Sisters, the podcast where your hosts and fellow travelers, Michelle and Kelly, explore the ways that ritual can help you feel better through the ups and downs of life. So let's take a deep breath, and start this journey together.

Michelle:
Well, hello, Ritual Fam. We are here today with Camille Dungy. She is a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University and the author of several books, including Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, and the upcoming poetry anthology, America, A Love Story. She's here to speak with us around the theme of nurturing, and we are so excited to have you today, Camille. Welcome!

Camille:
Thank you, happy to be here!

Michelle:
Well, we always like to start by asking guests just to tell us a little bit about yourself and what season of life that you're in right now.

Camille:
Well, you gave the big points and I am in a season of a new book launching and so that's always a little bit of a flurry of exciting activity. And I'm also in a season of pretty intense parenting that I have a 15 year old daughter who is a pre-professional dancer and is making pretty major decisions about her next steps and whatever the next steps are; she will not be living in our home. And so thinking about being an open nest parent is an interesting new set of possibilities for me.

Michelle:
Yeah, that's a really big transition at that age.

Camille:
It's huge! She's only 15, so I feel very precious about every moment. 

Kelly:
Yeah. Wow. So so precious. Camille, when would that transition happen or it's still up in the air?

Camille:
It feels a little bit like the transition will happen tomorrow.

Audible Laughter

It just feels so sudden, it really, the fall, the fall will be the moment where she always goes away for the summer and does what they call summer intensives, which are like math camp, but for dancers, you know, intense all day training with other people who are also focused on this craft. And then she will be living somewhere and dancing regularly in the fall. We'll know the time that this is aired. I will have answers that I don't have while we're having this conversation. And so that is part of the season where I am in life is a kind of day at a time. You can't have all the answers. The answers will reveal themselves. And I actually am not necessarily rushing the answers because I know that the answers actually mean a kind of really fundamental change. And so I'm trying really desperately moment by moment to live in the moment.

Kelly:
Yeah, that's powerful wisdom to share. And I feel like no matter where someone's sitting, right, to take that in and relate it to their own life. So thanks for saying that. 

Camille: 
You’re welcome

Kelly:
Camille, we'd love to hear a little bit about America, A Love Story. And I know we'll, of course, get more into it, but just, initially, we'd love to hear a bit about it.

Camille:
America, A Love Story is my first book of solely poetry since 2017. In 2023, I published a book-length narrative called Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, which was in the brief overview, follows seven years of my family's efforts to diversify the landscape around us, starting in our yard, and that is both an ecological diversification and a cultural diversification as the only black family on our block and one of very few black families in our whole town. That was primarily prose, also a few poems and some images and things really focused on questions of ecology and environment, also history and family. 

In America, A Love Story, I move back to my first love - which is poetry, that's the genre in which I trained. It's the genre that Colorado State University hired me to teach, even though I do many things there. And the poems are thinking really critically about what it means to love and be loved in America in this particular historical moment. And how I can hold fear and rage and concern and hope and joy and celebration, at the same time, with so many threats and questions happening all around me, both on a national level and then also in my house, in these kind of more personal domestic moments.

Michelle:
Yeah, it's just such a beautiful integration of all of those things. 

Camille:
Thank you

Michelle:
So we also ask everyone about their relationship to rituals and ceremonies. How would you describe that for you?

Camille:
It's such an interesting question because I think possibly to be a poet is to be fundamentally into ritual. 

Kelly:
Ohhhhhh, I love that!

Audible Laughter

Camile:
The very act of committing to writing poetry is an act of, of being excited to engage in a form of incantation and also the process of writing poetry is so often ritualistic. There are a certain number of lines you're using, a certain word count. I have a series of poems in America, A Love Story that are all exactly 700 characters long and the ritual of keeping to exactly 700 characters, which is harder to count than syllables or words or some of the other larger numerical rituals that we would put on a poem, that precision was the ceremony, I guess, that I needed to be able to get myself into the freedom to meditate on many of the topics that are held in those poems. 

And so believing in the power of regularly doing something the same way again and again with similar but always slightly different result feels, as I said, fundamental to being a poet. And therefore, because I'm somebody who claims that particular art, it must be something that's fundamentally relevant to me, right? Something that I'm drawn to.

Kelly:
I wonder too, Camille, if you could share, yeah, if listeners are wondering why the 700 characters.

Camille:
I will. This is an extension of this idea that I learned a statistic that the average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child's life, which is an insane amount of time. I calculated it to be the equivalent of 29 days or February in a leap year. Not just a regular February, the extra long one. 

Audible Laugher 

And so that number just astounded me and I found myself writing poems that were engaged with questions of what I was doing to cause this lost sleep, right? What was keeping me up at night? What was troubling me? And so some of the poems have to do with child rearing questions and some of the poems have to do with natural politics - some an intersection of both. 

But the thing that felt really interesting to me about the 700 character decision was that it forced these pieces to be small, that's not very long. And it does often feel like the things that keep us from sleep, as we're raising children, are small incidental, just minutia of life. And so the poems themselves are reflecting that in the form. And also it's invisible - unless you happen to have a PDF version of this book and are able to do the word count tool. Nobody can really fully know how many characters go into each of these individual poems. And so as with so much of the labor of mothers and Black women in this country, it's invisible. You don't see or you can't know the amount of time and energy and care and work that went into the 700 character poems. And so that practice became the opposite of flashy and to me, very reflective of the questions surrounding labor and concern that became central to this book.

Michelle:
Well, Camille, you write so beautifully about the integration of your identity as a mom and your relationship with nature and how we ourselves are part of nature, especially in Soil. Can you speak more about your, you know, how you see gardening and your relationship to nature as part of creating a home?

Camille:
Gardening is also a ritual, right? There are very consistent seasons, times of day, practices that we who garden do over and over and over again. And to miss one of those markers has consequence, and can feel frustrating and disorienting. And so those patterns that we return to again and again in the garden feel like a necessary safety for an otherwise sort of confusing life, right? I don't entirely know what mid-May is going to hold for me, but I do know that it will be warm enough for me to clear last winter's growth from the garden and make space for new growth. That I know will have to happen within about a 10 day window or there'll be too much new growth and it'll be hard to do that, right? So gardening is this - one of the few places in an otherwise kind of chaotic life that I'm leading right now that has parameters that I feel excited to comply with.

Audible Laughter 

Michelle:
Yeah, because it's kind of like this relationship between you and this outside source that feels like, I don't know, like nourishing in a way that doesn't like sometimes society's pressures don't feel nourishing.

Camille:
Nourishing and collaborative, right? That the plants are going to grow, whether I clear that brush or not, the plants are going to grow. But by my clearing the brush in the right time, not too soon, not too late, I'm collaborating and making this incredible beauty that I get to enjoy and everybody out walking their dogs gets to enjoy. And it becomes this communal process of care that I can be involved with and enjoy and get some direct benefits. You know, I get physical benefits from it. It's a good exercise. I'm out. I get fresh air, but also I get these longer term benefits of knowing that I'm part of creating beauty, knowing that I'm doing pollinator support, knowing that I'm doing carbon capture, all of these kinds of things that are, that are much, much bigger than me.

Kelly: 
I love, Camille, how you just highlighted, yeah, that community piece. And it's so funny because we had neighbors move in a couple years ago and they looked over at our garden and they remember - they’re wild flowers - so they kind of change and the colors evolve, but they were just so struck and they remember the colors that they were. It was really beautiful feedback for my partner and I to be like, wow. Like, yes, our neighbors did notice that. And even the fence is really tall and they still - right, we're able to take that in. So I totally agree with you. Just that shared beauty. Yeah.

Camille: 
It's a special thing. There are not many of those in contemporary ways, domestic tasks that can be as forward facing. You know, I know people who crochet and do needle point and things like that, but that's a closer community. But anybody who walks their dog in my very, very dog walkie neighborhood.

Audible Laughter 

Kelly: 
Colorado, they love their dogs! 

So Camille, our next question is, what does nurturing/tending to mean to you? And how is it shaped by context such as place, identities, history?

Camille:
I think I have always been a nurturer. I'm sort of smiling when I say this because I don't know that I would have always been read as a nurturer. I didn't have my child until I was nearly 40. And for women in most cultures, definitely this culture, not having a child is often a sign of a kind of selfishness and not being a nurturing person. And so when I had my child, I sort of got a kind of automatic entry into nurturing land, which is not a given, right? Just because you're a mother doesn't mean you're a nurturer. 

Kelly:
Truly

Michelle:
Yes

Camille:
But I think it's understood to be a given. But I think it's interesting that I would not necessarily have been read that way because, even before I had my child, I was always deeply invested in community. I always made a point to stay really connected with friends who I met along the path and create a fictive kinship with friends that are as if siblings or cousins to me - in that sort of very strong connection, regular, regularly reaching out and checking on each other, that kind of thing. And also professionally, I spent almost an equal portion of my career as an editor, whose focus - whose creative focus has been on bringing new writers into conversations where I believe they need to be seen and encouraged to thrive. 

And so I edited an anthology of African American environmental poets. I was a co-editor of an anthology for a website that an organization that I co-founded that was about highlighting emerging writers who at the time that they were brought into the community had fewer than two books. I mean I've made deep professional efforts to nurture these various writing communities, not to mention I have spent several decades as a professor nurturing countless new students, so many so that I feel very badly when I encounter a new class. It's way too long in the semester before I can remember each individual's name and connect the name with the face because I've had so many names and faces in front of me. But well before I know the student's name and face, I know - I start to understand things fundamentally about them - what kind of question that student's about to ask, what kind of face they're gonna make when I flash a slide up on the screen, you know? 

Audible Laughter 

That to me feels like it is the kind of attention that somebody who is fundamentally engaged with care would have.

Kelly: 
Yeah, such deep. There's intimacy there. I love how you just described the small little, yeah, the non-verbals, but they do speak volumes.

Camille:
Yes, yeah. And that was part of me well before I was a mother. So, I mean, I love my kid and I absolutely hope to nurture her for the rest of her life or the rest of, actually the rest of her life. Like, I think I could, you can do some of this work even after, even after you're gone. But that is not the limiting factor of what makes me somebody who cares in that way.

Michelle: 
Yeah, I love the expansive view on nurturing and I sense that so much in your writing that there's so much care for just the communities that you're involved in and the people around you and the beings around you, too.

Camille:
Thank you. Right. Right. Because as a gardener, as somebody who's been environmentally, intellectually, environmentally engaged for going on, you know, 20 years now as a conscious effort, part of the other question is how to live in, a kind of mutually sustaining relationship with the greater than human world as well. So that question of nurturing to me can't stop with the human, it has to extend to plants and animals and the air and the land and so many other components of the living world.

Michelle: 
Well, we kind of touched on this a little bit talking about ritual, but we were also curious about how for you poetry helps to process ambiguity, change…the difficult sides of life.

Camille:
So there's a poem in Soil. The title of the poem is, In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a Black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence. And the title is the last thing that happened in the writing of the poem. I was trying to write a poem a day, working, just taking what came as I was writing. And sometimes this is harder than other times. And so I'll set up little prompts for myself or guidelines that I just, you know, just have to write 700 characters. That's all I have to do, whatever. Well, this particular poem, I call a four by four and the limitations that I set for it were that each line was four syllables long and each stanza had four lines in it. And so that was the thing that kept my frontal cortex busy. How can I move through writing this poem with that sort of spareness to it? 

But really it's a poem about the Trail Ridge Road clearance report. That's what the poem is like, the body of the poem is just the story of how plows come from both ends of Trail Ridge Road and slowly but surely work their way towards some meeting in the middle on the highest road in the nation, which feels metaphorical and is also true about Trail Ridge Road. And I was simply having fun writing a poem about the Trail Ridge Road clearance process. This was my husband's thing in 2020 when the George Floyd things were going on. Everything was just wild and crazy. And instead of opening his phone first thing in the morning and reading the mail, he opened his phone first thing in the morning and would read the Trail Ridge Road clearance report and report to me what was going on.

And so he reported one morning, I went in and wrote this poem about the Trail Ridge Road clearance report. Did my four by four structure - have this poem that was on one level purely about trying to clear snow from the highest road in the country. And when I finished the poem, I realized that that had been a way for me to think about how frustratingly continuous, but also when done right and with dedication, potentially successful, this work towards connection and protesting racialized violence can be. It really wasn't until late in the drafting that I realized that I was so interested in this clearance process as a metaphor for the things that show up in the title of the book. 

And so that to me feels like part of what poetry can do for me and for the reader is it allows access into those parts of our psyche, our conscious, our understanding that we cannot immediately or continually access because they are hard, because we have to sometimes

quiet that stimulus if I intend to keep surviving. And so I can write my poems about flowers and about trees and about snow clearance and also make bigger, deeper connections. I think poetry can do this just a little more efficiently than prose can. Prose does it also, but poetry can do it with immense efficiency and I appreciate that about it.

Kelly:
I completely agree, even just reading America, A Love Story once through, and I didn't write on it at all. Like, I just read it. But I'm so excited, Camille, to go back with my colorful pen and just engage with it, because I think it does - all those crevices you're talking about, we can read it differently each time. And there's these new meanings that pop up.

Camille:
That's what we aim for.

Michelle:
In Soil, you write about this slow but rewarding process of moving from a homogenous to a more diverse landscape. Any rituals come to mind that can help people in creating diverse spaces and holding ourselves accountable for history in the process.

Camille:
I have an aunt, she was my mom's best friend. I write about her in Soil. It's the Aunt Mary I write about in Soil. She taught high school theater and speech and debate at Loveland High for years and years. And every summer she did something scary. She started doing triathlons. She was a self-proclaimed chubby little Midwestern lady. 

Audible Laughter 

Kelly:
Shoutout Midwest!

Audible Laughter 

Camille:
That's how she described herself. And she did triathlons. She said she said that she would get out there and people would just look like, what is this lady doing out here? She started lifting weights. She did, you know, like the list goes on and on for the things that she did outside of her own comfort zone. And she said she did these every summer - terrified, at first - because starting in the school year, she would be asking her students to do something that terrified them.

And she wanted - I'm getting teary. She wanted to know what that felt like for them. And she wanted to honor what they were doing by doing something scary herself.

So that's a ritual. She does this every summer. This is what she did every summer. Since you're asking this question about diversity specifically. Diversity scares people. What diversity demands is that you decenter yourself. It demands that people move into spaces where they don't know who they're gonna meet, what the expectations of who they're gonna meet are going to be, whether they're going to say the right thing or the wrong thing, do the right thing or the wrong thing. It's a lot of unknowns. And if we do not demand of ourselves to take those risks, to put yourself into these spaces of newness with new communities, spaces where you maybe don't talk, where you maybe actually just enter and listen.

For a lot of people, just listening is actually a unique experience.

Audible Laughter 

Michelle:
Ohhhhh yes

Camille: 
Creating a monthly - I think yearly is not enough for the work that we need to do. A monthly, bi-weekly, a weekly opportunity to, for, I'm talking to white people now, for white people to put themselves in spaces where they're in community with people who are different from their own norm, the norm that they knew, is a big ask. And I believe it's the necessary ask. I think it's the thing that could make real change. 

You know, I have that statistic in Soil, which is insane. It was so insane I had to write it, you know, because I can't just mention it. 75%, an average of 75% of White Americans have no person in their friend and family group who's not white, not a single person. 75% of White Americans do not have a single person in their close circle of family and friends who is not white. And that helps to explain how it can feel just normal and easy to think that a Black and Asian woman couldn't possibly be president because there's no precedent in these people's worlds for an intelligent, highly efficient, compassionate Black Asian woman leader. 

And if you look at the White folks who did vote for Kamala, they were primarily in more diverse communities because it did not seem surprising that this could happen. And so asking more and more people to move outside of very small echo chambers is clearly a big ask. And I think it's - 
I think it's the ritual and just making it ritualistic, right? It's like, when I go to the grocery store, it's just, I have a thing. I'm going to tell one person in the grocery store a compliment. I'm going to tell them their hair looks good or the glasses are nice or their outfit is nice. I'm just going to do something every time I go to the grocery store because the grocery store is terrible.

Audible Laughter

Kelly: 
Oh my gosh yes - I do get stressed at the grocery store. Thank you for saying that.

Camille: 
But if I have this one moment of sharing kindness for no reason at all, except for that they did something that gave me joy and I'm going to tell them that, that is like a tiny thing. But then do that for somebody who might be different than the kinds of people that you're talking to regularly.

That's just a tiny little ritual that just makes them more comfortable. I bet you people aren't going to be offended most of the time. Every once in a while the compliment will be off. And that is also a learning experience, right? 

Kelly:
Yes!

Michelle:
Yeah, that’s great advice, just building on getting out of your comfort zone and just keep doing it. Love that.

Kelly:
I love that that entire thing started from your Aunt Mary too. Wow, that was touching, Camille. Thank you for sharing that with us…that was really moving.

Camille:
Thank you. 

I think of her a lot. It's part of why I think you can still nurture people after you're gone, right? The lessons that she gave me and the support she gave me, it never goes away. 

Kelly: 
Well, we have one more question for this ritual section. Any rituals for people that are engaged in nurturing something challenging, be that a garden, motherhood or project. So rituals for people that can help them engage in something challenging.

Camille:
Well, I started to answer that question in terms of the outward facing things that can be done, but it's also really important for self care, right? So we all need to create rituals of self -care that support our ability to do this work. Hard work means we need rest.

Hard work means we need restoration. Hard work means we need safe spaces to come back to. And so creating those kinds of patterns that are not draining, are not, I mean, I love cooking, but I don't know that I should call cooking my ritual for self-care because I end up being the person who cooks for the whole house. And then I very, very quickly, can become resentful about this thing that would otherwise be a pleasure to me. And so that - I do want to be careful that really you have to come up with things that are really for you and they don't have to take a lot of time. I've just decided that napping is okay. Napping is all right. I don't have to be

embarrassed that a 20 minute nap helps me be better. Right. And so maybe that's one of my rituals is just letting myself not, they're not long naps, like 20 minutes, and often I'm literally just closing my eyes. I'm not actually sleeping. I'm just closing my eyes and turning off the sounds and being with myself in the middle of the day. It's luxury, you know, it feels profligate. 

Audible Laugher

I don't do it every day, you know, a couple of times a week there's a 20 minute, little 20 minute downtime that I create. That's not a huge thing I'm saying, but, but I think that these things are necessary to recharge so that you can go back out and do this difficult work.

Michelle:
Definitely needs both sides of it for sure. 

Kelly:
Yeah. 

Michelle: 
All right. Well, this has been a lovely conversation. We really appreciate you sharing with us, Camille, and we're excited to continue a little bit on the Patreon for those subscribers and otherwise, wherever you're at, whatever you're doing right now, we hope you have a magical time. Goodbye!

Kelly:
All right. Bye, everyone! 

Camille:
Bye bye!