Dear Listener,

Immediately after my conversation with debut poet and teaching artist Gabrielle Octavia Rucker I might’ve told you it was about many of the same things that Cody-Rose Clevidence and I discussed in our conversation last summer: reading, spiritual yearning, the long slow beautiful failure of humanity. But as I think back on this episode now, months later, different things are on my mind.

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer and editor from the Great Lakes currently living on the Gulf Coast. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction, is currently available via The Song Cave.

I requested Dereliction from The Song Cave (which is, by the way, a fantastic press that you all should support), having read very little of her work, because Gabrielle's bio on the press’s site described her as a self-taught artist, a vanishingly rare thing in poetry, and I thought it would be interesting to talk to her about what that means. Then I read Gabrielle’s book and loved it.

Gabrielle agreed to record a conversation with me at Rachel’s apartment on a weekend in February when she was in town from New Orleans. One of the first things we discussed, before I started recording, while I struggled to unlock Rachel’s front door, was that she used to live in New York City and why she left.

Now, after months of my partner and I watching our apartment fall apart and rents creep up across the city, my partner and I have decided to leave New York and move to a cheaper, smaller city close to family. I'll be leaving my job behind and moving without anything lined up. This all feels very precarious, and even as my friends and family congratulate me on taking this step I wonder if this next step is going to be off a cliff.

Because all this is on my mind, the parts of the conversation that stand out most to me in hindsight are different. I have new questions that I wish I’d asked: How did you do it? How did you teach yourself to write? How did you make a life out of it, living in some of the most expensive cities in the country, and how did you decide to leave New York and how did you leave the wage economy and start working for yourself? But with hindsight I’m even more grateful for the parts of this conversation where Gabrielle and I talk, frankly and without rancor, about the jobs that have stolen our time and the tough joys of making one’s own decisions about what we will, and won’t, do to survive.

I hope that you will enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed making it, and I hope you will go out and buy Dereliction (and maybe a few other Song Cave titles).

All listeners can find more of Gabrielle’s work through her are.na channel, where she compiles much of the research for her creative work and classes she teaches, and Sparkle Nation's radio archive. Sparkle Nation is a now defunct literary arts collective Gabrielle started alongside her friends Diamond Stingily and Precious Okoyomon that used to host book club meetings and other public programming. Sparkle Nation also briefly hosted an hour-long segment on Montez Press Radio.

Commonplace patrons will also get access to a list of some of Gabrielle's favorite things right now–including music, literary magazines, a cooking blog, and more–with comments by Gabrielle.

Some members of the Commonplace Book Club will receive one of the following books, courtesy of The Song Cave, Kelsey Street Press, and the University of Pittsburgh Press: Gabrielle Rucker’s Dereliction, Metta Sama’s Swing At Your Own Risk, and Ed Roberson’s When Thy King Is A Boy.

For this episode, Commonplace's charitable partner will donate $250 to Keep Eyes on Sudan, run by members of the Sudanese diaspora to amplify the calls of the Sudanese people for sovereignty and support. Keep Eyes on Sudan was “initially created after the military forces staged a coup on the 25th of October, 2021, overthrowing the Sovereignty Council in power, cutting off phone and internet access across the country, and violently cracking down on all civilian protests."

Thank you, as always, for listening and keeping up the conversations with us.

With gratitude,

Valentine & the Commonplace Team