Kiese Laymon Knocks my MFA hustle

reflecting on another gift Mississippi keeps giving me/us

Kiese Laymon How to slowly kill yourself and others in America

For school, we have to write annotated bibliographies on the books we read each semester. Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? hear it

go:

For me, reading Kiese’s nonfiction is difficult in ways that reading few other books are. It triggers my insecurities around living, writing, and feeling Black masculinity that few others do. This makes it difficult to read his work for craft. I can get caught up in comparing myself unfavorably to him, undervaluing my own life experience and my own perspective in the process.

Kiese’s nonfiction also evokes possibilities in my own writing that challenge me to dig deeper (in ways that hopefully lean towards inspiration and not comparison). Steel can sharpen steel as we used to say in hip hop Detroit.

Actually, we said “steel sharpens steel.” (Why did I qualify it, or soften the steel just then?)