Interview between Kaveh Akbar, author of “Martyr!” and Rey M. Rodríguez

The Chapter House Storyteller’s Corner has the privilege of interviewing many extraordinary authors and poets. Each leads us to different writing destinations and we hope they guide the reader to a fuller literary life. The following interview with Kaveh Akbar is a continuation of such a journey.

Mr. Akbar is an Iranian-American poet, novelist, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell and the novel Martyr!, a New York Times bestseller, and National Book Award finalist.

When I picked up Martyr!, I felt as if I had found a long-lost travel companion regarding life’s deep questions. The first paragraph galvanized me and led me on a journey to explore so many wondrous questions surrounding the existence of God, her multiple possible definitions and meanings, Mozart and his “Allegri’s Miserere”, the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, what does it mean to have a meaningful death?, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by two surface-to-air missiles fired by the USS Vincennes, a United States warship killing 290 people: 274 passengers and a crew of 16, what does the death of so many mean?, what were the reverberations of this event?, and so many more unexpected journeys of the mind and soul.

The book overwhelmed me with many emotions —- often too complex to express with language. And that is why I connected so strongly to this book. At its essence, Martyr! explores the ineffable. It is this exploration of the indescribable that makes this book worth reading. It takes courage to do so, and if a reader decides to take the journey and release themselves in the story, then they will be surprised as to how well Mr. Akbar succeeds in doing the seemingly impossible.

When I read the last word in the book I thought my journey had ended, but, to my delight, Mr. Akbar agreed to be interviewed. And so, the joyful trip of discovery continued because in preparation for my talk with him, I started reading Mr. Akbar’s poetry anthology entitled, The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verses: 101 Poets on the Divine. As with the first, this one opened a whole new universe of thought for me. It transported me and put me in contact with Enheduanna, Li Po, Hildegard of Bingen, Saadi Shizari, Nezahualcoyotl, and many more poets who redefined my notion of the divine.

And even after this experience, my literary adventure did not end, because during the interview Mr. Akbar mentioned a website called divedapper.com where he had interviewed poets much like we do here at Storyteller’s Corner. After reading a few, I landed upon Mr. Akbar’s interview with Max Ritvo, author of Four Reincarnations and Aeons. If the reader has not already done so, I highly recommend taking a moment to read this revelatory and raw conversation. It was posted on July 18, 2016, and Mr. Ritvo died on August 23, 2016. He knew he had a terminal illness so the interview transcends the moment and speaks honestly and vulnerably about poetry, beauty, friendship, humor, and love.

All of this is to say that I hope that this Storyteller’s Corner interview with Mr. Akbar starts the reader on a similar trip of literary self-discovery.

Kaveh Akbar. Welcome to the Chapter House Storyteller's Corner, the literary blog for the Institute of American Indian Arts. I understand you're a big fan of Borges and of the Simpsons.

Those are two of my touchstones. Yes.

So when I was in college, I got to meet Jorge Luis Borges. He came to speak at my university. During a press conference after his talk. I snuck in when they were interviewing him. As a “press person,” I asked him, “Do you believe in free will or determinism?” And he responded, “I believe in determinism. But I must pretend I live in a world of free will.”

Wow! What a cool story to have! That's amazing.

It was great!

What year was this?

So this would have been around 1983. He was near the end of his life. During his talk, he was assisted by two Argentine female assistants who helped him sit at a desk in front of a packed auditorium. They sat beside him and he then spoke for an hour. And there were at least 500 people in the room. Everybody was in awe of him.

What a privilege!

It was one of the highlights of going to college. I was always so excited about being in college, and then to get to see him was a joy.

Unbelievable.

But I'm curious, how would you answer the question?

I mean, I can't improve upon Borges. It is funny to simultaneously believe that everything is written, and also everything is a choice, driven by desire. But also to be keenly aware of the mutability of desire, the elasticity, and the plasticity.

There are, I believe, forces that are so many orders of magnitude beyond my comprehension. I don't know that there's a lot of difference between believing in free will and having free will.

Wonderful. How did you get into writing, and what was your writing journey?

I learned to write English as I learned to speak it. Farsi was my first language, and so when we came to America I was introduced to the alphabet and the orthography of English as I was learning to speak it. Which is not generally how one learns what will become their first language, right? One usually learns their first language organically through immersion as a child. But mine was much more regimented and structured. And so the materiality of the language was foregrounded. The architecture and the elasticity of the language were foregrounded for me in a way that allowed me to see it as a site for play, manipulation, and exploration early on. My mother has pictures of poems and stories that I wrote when I was three and four years old. I wrote by hand, and I wrote a chapter book when I was five. It was about a boy with his invisible pet dinosaur.

How lovely.

It had chapters. It had a full narrative arc. And so, the beginning of my writing journey is the beginning of language for me. There was never really a partition between the two, and there's never been a cessation. There hasn't been a significant period of my life when I haven't written in some capacity, whether it's stories, essays, or poems. I had a high school English teacher who showed me poetry and that suddenly seemed like a viable way to remain alive and on the planet. If one could pay their electric bill, and house and feed and clothe themselves by writing poems, I wanted to be part of that.

When I stepped into the 811.5 section of the library, I saw all these spines that had names on them of people who were still alive. And I was, like all of these people, do this, right? There was a sort of proof of concept for me. That seemed worth staying alive for. I wasn't particularly attached to remaining alive otherwise, but the idea that I could write poems and read poems and think about poetry for the rest of my life seemed much more worth staying alive for than becoming an engineer, or an accountant, or whatever. And so then I did. Obviously, addiction is a big part of my story and that eclipsed everything else for a time. That became the material of my days for a period of my life.

But even during that time, I still called myself a writer. I still thought of myself as a poet, even if I was only drinking about writing. It would be a thing where I would get someone to buy me a beer and a shot and I'd say I'll write you a poem if you buy me a beer and a shot, and then I had some Yeats poems that I had memorized, and I would write a Yeats poem on a napkin. But they didn't know. They didn't know that it wasn't a bridge that I was coming up with. So even then poetry was paying for my life, right? I was plagiarizing other people's poetry, but it was still paying for me, paying my way through the world. And then I got sober and it turned out that writing was a lot easier without pouring a potent neurotoxin on the organ that writing lives in.

Yes.

So it got a lot easier, and I suddenly had a lot more time. My days opened up because I wasn't going to this guy's house to buy this thing to sling it for this thing so I could flip for that and sling it for this so that I could make rent. I had 18 hours a day open up where I wasn't sleeping. And so I spent all that time in recovery meetings, and then also in the library. I just read. It sublimated those same addictions and obsessions, sort of sublimated into an obsession with recovery and recovery community, and also then an obsession with poetry and writing and reading constantly.

I started this website where I interviewed poets much like you're doing right now, where it's called divedapper.com, where I called my favorite poets and asked them to talk to me for an hour, and I got to pop their hoods and poke around, and ask, “How did you do this?” And then I would run back to my work and try out the thing that I had you answer. Oh, I just did this, that and the other, and then I would run back to my work and try that out, and then two weeks later I'd be interviewing someone else, and I'd be like, How did you do this? And they'd say this, that and the other, and I'd run back to my work and try it out, right? And so that was my education. I have degrees now, but my education was divedapper.com, and that process of interviewing poets and reading everything that they'd written in advance of interviewing each one of them so that I could talk to them intelligently. That was my education, and I wrote my first book, a poetry book called Calling a Wolf, a Wolf which came out and opened doors for me, where I got to then have a job teaching writing, and having a tenure track writing job is nice. You teach a couple of days a week, get to talk about your favorite thing in the world, work with people who also love the stuff you love, and talk to students who love the stuff that you love. Because of my experience with an active addiction, I've had a lot of jobs. I've driven forklifts for Subaru. I've been a short-order cook at a fifties nostalgia diner. I've had all sorts of jobs and I used to get fired a lot. And I know what work feels like. I substitute taught. I taught middle school for a time. You'll never hear me complaining about this life where I just get to talk to eager, enthusiastic people about my favorite thing in the world.

I'm a lawyer, and I've been doing that for over 30 years, and then I applied for this MFA program. Now, I'm living my best life so I feel so connected with you in terms of these last aspects of your story.

Doing law for 30 years, you're also thinking about the materiality of language and the way that language can build these architectures in lots of different directions.

Yes and the importance of storytelling. That storytelling does give life and that there's storytelling all around us. And it's in the moment and all of those different things...

And you are there to write it down.

Yes, and to be more present.

Right.

I interviewed Luis J. Rodríguez and he talks about this idea of balance—balance with ourselves, balance with others, balance with nature, and then balance with the divine. And I love that idea because we're often out of balance. In your book The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 101 Poets on the Divine, you discuss the concept of God in your introduction. How does your idea of God and or the divine animate your work?

Hmm! I think that's a beautiful question. Clearly, there is some force at work in the world, and cosmos around me that is greater than my ego. Right? That's fairly, empirically true. Right? I look out my window and I see trees, and I see some cars. I didn't do that. I didn't do trees. I didn't do snow on the ground. It's not even that I didn't do that, but I can't do that. And so, whatever you want to call that thing that is not-me. It's almost apophatic, right? I know that that is not me and I know that it's bigger than me. There are things at force in the world. There are forces at work in the world that are smaller than a human consciousness. Money is smaller than a human consciousness. Money is a byproduct of human consciousness. And so, then I know that money is not a higher power for me. Because, as a byproduct of human consciousness, it is smaller than I am. It is ancillary, it is auxiliary.

Photosynthesis, the photosynthesis that made that tree out of light from a star that came from 93 million miles away, that's bigger than me. I can't do that. That didn't come from me. That would have happened if I had never been here. If humans had never been here, the trees would still be here, right? And so I know that that's not of me, and therefore it's bigger than me.

When I came home and there were a bunch of deer outside our place. Just eating the sort of dry, frozen brush. They have nothing to do with me. Like they're they're not a byproduct of my consciousness in any way. They are surviving off of the glucose produced by light from a star that came 93 million miles. And so, if I look and observe God in these systems, right? These systems are greater than and independent of my or any human's consciousness. And I don't feel particularly driven to taxonomize it, name it, or evangelize. I don't think it's my job to convince my spouse to see the deer and think of God. I know this is a personal relationship that I have between the thing that I mean when I say God and the connection that I feel to a universe that is incalculably bigger than my ability to comprehend it.

The same way that I am composed of neurons that have no ability to apprehend my consciousness. A single neuron in my brain has no idea who Kaveh Akbar is or who Rey Rodríguez is, or the nice conversation that we're having right now. It is firing synapses, and in the same way, I, Kaveh Akbar, has no idea what God is. When I say God, I mean the sort of flailing around with my arms like this gesture, right? But I cannot apprehend that, any more than the neuron can apprehend me. Neither does the neuron exhaust itself, trying to apprehend me right like it does its job. And my job is to try to learn how to move through this world without harming it, and get a little better at that every day, right? I can empirically work my way into what I don't feel uncomfortable calling “faith,” or at least a recognition that there is more likely than not something larger than me at work here.

That's great. So along those lines. I know you do a lot of service for others. You have this belief in the need for action. There's a man by the name of Greg Boyle. He's written a book called Cherished Belonging. It's a new book. He's a Jesuit priest who's been working with formerly incarcerated people to get a new life. It's an incredible book. I think it's in conversation with Martyr!, even though it is nonfiction. He's worked for 40 years with these formerly incarcerated people, and he has these two unwavering principles. I'm curious as to how they resonate with you. The first principle is that everyone is unshakably good, without exception, and the second is that we belong to each other, without exception. In terms of the work that you do to rehabilitate people, I think you have this idea that rehabilitation is possible.

Yes, oh, absolutely. My life would be a farce if I didn't believe that.

So I'm curious, how do these two principles resonate with you?

Yes, it's a funny moment to ponder these ideas, because in my own practice, they're being challenged at present by concurrent genocides happening across the world, right? And and by the new American administration which mirrors other fascistic administrations throughout history and across the world. And I believe myself to have fully, emotionally, and spiritually divested from models of retributive justice, which is to say, I believe in rehabilitation absolutely without qualification. I don't believe that rehabilitation is only available to nonviolent offenders or only available to this person or that person. I genuinely believe in rehabilitation without qualification. I believe in rehabilitation. That's the end of the sentence. And yet, when I think about our current president, or Biden, or Netanyahu, or Blinken, and think about the rifts that these men have torn open across time. It does make me long for the comfort of a belief in some literal lake of fire. Hell!

Hmm.

They are able to cause such harm with impunity and seem totally unbothered by the harm that they are causing. I don't get the sense that our current president sleeps poorly at night out of concern for all that he's doing. You know what I mean?

Yes, there's a cruelty to it that is overwhelming.

For all my investment in rehabilitation, and for all of my divestment in models of retributive justice, I still feel this instinct in my brain that wants the scales to be even in some way. That wants something like retributive justice to be carried out, right? And so, yes, that's how I know that God's not done working on my soul.

Yes, I'm with you on this because I do believe in something greater than me. And I do believe that there's this goodness, but it is being tested now as to how powerful love is.

In a moment, please, exactly. The incalculable impenitent cruelty of this administration, of Netanyahu's regime, of their allies across the world. You know it is easy for me to look in the eyes of a person in recovery who has done the vilest shit that you can name, and still see a person worthy of recovery, still see a person who can make me laugh, right? It is much more abstract when applied to people whose identities in my mind are synonymous with the harm that they've caused. Like these politicians who are just cravenly tearing open holes across the world and in people's lives and murdering people who look like my uncles and my nieces and my cousins. I feel a rage that is born of a surfeit of compassion, and an ability to perceive the harmed as being alive with interiorities as vital and complex as my own.

Thank you for answering such impossible questions. I know you have this appreciation for poetry, so I must ask, “What is poetry?”

Hmm. My favorite definition of poetry is by the poet Mary Leader, “a poem is a thing,” and I think any narrower definition would infringe on somebody's idea of poetry. If I were coming up with my own definition, I might say poetry is a thing with language. But even then I'm sure that that amendment probably infringes upon something that somebody has made or believes is poetry or that they would like to have read as poetry. My job is to make poems and shapes that hopefully delight and instruct. As a teacher, I can help my students try to recognize their visions for what they believe a poem is and help them carry what they're doing to their vision toward their vision. It is useful when our ambition, our creative ambition dwarfs our abilities. But I don't think it's my job to offer some pronouncement that this is poetry, this isn't poetry. I'm not offended by someone calling something a poem that isn't delightful for me. This is really none of my business.

But it is life for you, right? You brought out the Popol Vuh in your anthology of poems that few others acknowledge. It has been erased in a sense.

Yes, there's a poem in there by the Nahua people about a midwife addressing a woman who has died in childbirth, and it's from 500-plus years ago. But you read that, and you can map the five stages of grief directly onto it like anger, denial, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. Right? This is a phenomenon that was only named in grief studies in the 20th century by the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kupler Ross. But you read what the Nahua people were teaching 500 years ago, and you realize that they were teaching how to move through these five stages of what they were saying. This is what you were going to experience when you're grieving, right? And they didn't call it clinical psychiatry.

We're so precedented. And the clock resets with every birth, right? In terms of our spiritual understanding, and so to be able to go back to the Popol Vuh or to Sor Juana de la Cruz, or to the Nahua people, or whoever else is in there the aboriginal antipodean poetries or the sub-saharan African poetries and say, Oh, shit! They were saying the same things that we've been saying and they have actually provided models for us to move through this life that so often seem defined by the experience of grief or the experience of anger.

They also teach this whole idea of the importance of silence and the idea of slowing down. There's so much wisdom in that. I only knew you first because of Martyr! and then, as I explored more, I discovered The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. I was so happy because I'm writing a novel that tracks the Popul Vuh and you made reference to it in a way that uplifts wisdom that should be known and studied.

Oh, cool!

So I was really excited that you had identified this work because at its essence is the idea of being a creative person. That the universe ends in a sense if one doesn’t create.

Yes. It's beautifully put.

Then I encountered Winter in the Blood by James Welch. He's an Indigenous writer and Louis Erdrich wrote a forward to the book.

Cool.

I want to argue that Winter in the Blood is also in conversation with Martyr!. The former is a novel that began as a poem. Erdrich writes about this beautiful idea in the foreword to the Welch book. She says, “Poetic lyricism is also the best kind of voice for a tale in which one can become lost, even while finding what might seem impossible to find: a self against an invisible but ever-running under-memory of massacre.”

Under-memory of massacre. Wow!

I know you started as a poet. But how does poetry inform you as a writer for a novel, and vice versa?

Well, I love that concept of under-memory. I love the idea that we all have these landscapes upon which we are walking that might not be visible or legible to the people around us, or even to ourselves all the time. But there is that omnipresent under-memory. That's a beautiful word. Yes. And I will look forward to reading that. I was working on that anthology while I was writing Martyr!. They came out the same year. And so, to make that anthology, I had to be reading lots of poetry with which I was not necessarily familiar. I didn't know a lot about antipodean aboriginal poetries. I didn't know a lot about lots of the poems in there, but I discovered them in my research.

And so my brain, my lyric algorithms were being pollinated, obviously, by all of these different cultures, by all of these different times, and all of that indelibly inflects Martyr!. Right? I can't point to this or that sentence and say, like, Oh, this came from the Popul Vuh, and this came from the Bhagavad Gita. And this came from Gilgamesh, right? But I was reading those texts and reading various translations of each text to decide which translation I was going to use while I was also writing the pages of Martyr!. They were concurrent projects for me, and so woven everywhere through Martyr! is this obsession with the spirit, with wisdom from antiquity, with trying to make the aperture big enough to understand the human project at the scale of geological time. Also, it had this just humbling effect that reading Dante or Milton, or Mahadeviyakka, Yaqui, or Patacara, or Rabi’ al-Basri, or the Popul Vuh, or any of these texts has on one as a writer. It is like writing under the vast shadow of Paradise Lost.

Right?

It's a very humbling enterprise to call oneself a poet when one is also reading the Bhagavad Gita. To say that I am engaged in similar enterprises is absurd. And so it's humbling, and in that humility is a kind of freedom. I'm not going to be Dickinson, right? And so I might as well just do whatever I want to do. I might as well just not even worry.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's powerful.

There's a freedom in that radical humbling that comes with reading.

Wow, so I'm curious, how do you choose the books to read while you're writing?

When I'm walking in the bookstore, whatever leaps out to me. When I'm in the library. I mean, maybe if someone recommends me a book I'll order it, and then it'll be sitting around, and I'll keep looking at the cover while I read other stuff for three months, and then finally, I'll randomly pick it up, and I'll be like, Oh, shit! This is that book that Karen was telling me about and I'll read that and then Tommy will be like, Yo, have you read? I'll be like, yeah, I was just reading and so it's just chaos.

Lots of people are much more regimented about it, and they'll say, like, Oh, I have to read this many nonfiction books and this many books. I just read. I read everything. I'm really quick to put a book down. There's just too much good stuff to read, to spend time reading things that aren't interesting to me, or that you know, or that are interesting to me up to a point, but that I don't feel compelled to pick back up, right? And so I will put a 300-page book down on page 270, and not pick it back up. If a book is interesting to me, I'll read it, and if it stops being interesting I'll put it down and start reading the next thing, right? I read a lot.

That's totally what Borges said, Borges said, “Read what you love.”

He had a similar attention span to me. It's like he had a short story and poem-sized attention span.

Yes.

He would get the idea of something and write it down. And he's like, I don't need to write 80,000 words about this idea that I had 5,000 words of something to say about.

Yes. So good. Now, I have so many things to discuss about Martyr!, but I will limit it to three specific questions. The first relates to Michelangelo. Last year I got to go to Florence and see the David and we had an art tour. During it, they explained the difference between Michelangelo and any other sculptor of his time was that unlike the others he knew that the David was already in the marble.

I talk about Michelangelo in Martyr!.

Yes, you talk about that being the chisel. Did you have a similar experience writing Martyr!, because you wrote so many more pages than what was finally published? Did you know that the essence of the story was in all of those pages? You simply had to allow it to be released from the marble?

Absolutely. You dig up. In this metaphor, you have your marble quarry, and you dig up way more than you need, and then you just chip away. And as you know, I traded pages with Tommy Orange for four or five years every Friday to write what would become Wandering Stars for him and Martyr! for me. And we wrote way more than we needed. There's an expanded universe that could be a thousand pages long. But I do believe in honoring the reader's time if they're giving me a measure of their most irreplenishable resource, which is time.

If I looked at a chapter, or a section, or a paragraph, or a sentence, or a word, and said, “Does the story work without this?” If the answer was yes, I cut it.

But the payoffs are so amazing. I love on page 229 when you talk about Cyrus. The audio version is amazing by the way. I heard the audio and I read the book. The audio version changes the whole novel.

The guy who did the audiobook, Arian Moayed, is such a genius. He is a transcendent, award-winning actor. He's on Broadway a bunch of times, and this genius actor elevates it into its own thing. It becomes a sort of one-man play. It becomes something much greater than the mere text with which he was given.

No doubt. Do you read out loud the entire novel when you're done?

My ear is my best editor. Whenever I'm writing a sentence, a paragraph, or a page, I will read it out loud to myself. It's embarrassing how well I know this novel. When you say page 222, or whatever, and you read me two words, I can complete the sentence.

You know it that well?

I've been over it so many times.

The dialogue between the uncle, Arash, and Cyrus is brilliant. When the uncle says, “You won't understand even if you heard it, nephew. Get it? I listen to it and see God in it because I've been God.” And then, of course, I had to listen to the music that you referenced.

Allegri's Miserere.

Yes, and I was listening to it and it's so true. You could listen to it a thousand times and it still sounds new.

Yes, which makes the Mozart thing all the more remarkable, right? That he could just hear it and then run home and transcribe it.

Yes, so how did you come to that idea of “I've been God” and that Cyrus couldn't understand? As a father, my children can understand my words, but they don't always understand what I am trying to communicate. I think that's why this moment in the book resonated deeply with me. Thank you for capturing it.

That experience just rhymes with being alive, right? The idea is that our internal life is utterly untranslatable. The idea that the most epiphanic experiences that we have in this world, like the person that I could describe, the great sort of spiritual epiphanies that I've had in this life to my spouse, who is the person on this planet who knows me the best, who loves me the best, and still they wouldn't have the same epiphanic experience that I'm describing. They might be the untranslatability of our effusions, of our passions, is a crisis of communication, because language is insufficient, right? And that moment where this person who clearly loves Cyrus and had this bizarre job in the war that wrecked him in certain ways, and he's trying to connect with his nephew in certain ways. But he has had to mature along psycho-spiritual lines that his nephew just hasn't had to yet. That his nephew will never have to. And so there's this untranslatability of experience. I thank God I know. Thank God, yes.

Also, I mean just crafty, as you're writing your novel. One of the iron laws of writing dialogue is that people are very infrequently talking to each other. You're sort of 80% carrying on a monologue and 20% talking, saying things that allow you to keep the conversation going until it's your next person’s turn to deliver your part of the monologue right?

And also in fiction writing and screenplay on stage, in theater, right? Two characters can never agree. You can never say, “Oh, we need to go buy milk.” “Okay.” That's the end of the scene. It has to be. “Oh, we need to go buy milk.” “Wait! I just bought milk.” “No, we're out.” “Well, what happened to the milk?” There has to be something that keeps it going. There has to be some sort of dynamism and some conflict that keeps it going.

And so, thinking about ways in dialogue between characters to do that. It's this funny juggling act that I find really satisfying as a writer to have characters reveal their interiorities through the things that they say and don't say to each other.

The beauty of the dialogue is that there's so much love in it. It's so lovely because Cyrus just wants to know about the painting.

Yes, but he's just sort of allowing his uncle to be like, Oh, I'm kind of learning French, ...

Yes, he's talking about the Lebanese woman, and it's just so lovely.

It's like you call to talk about something, but then you have to let them go through their life report.

Yes, I have to hear all of this so I can get to this one thing that I want. And how do I get to it without being that jerk, and then he gets found out to be the jerk in any event?

You never call.

Yes.

Calling to catch up, but really just wanted to ask about this painting.

Yes. So that was cool. So then the last question I have on the book is the idea of the devil. This whole idea is that we're empty human beings, and we must fill the hollow with God. What's the background of that story?

It's a real story. I mean, that's a real fairy tale of a certain kind. It's a toss-away hadith, right? So it's not in the Quran. It's sort of apocryphal. Some people say that the prophet said this, but it just feels like the devil is inspecting Adam and going through all of him, and he emerges, laughing, and saying, Oh, he's all hollow. It'll be easy to just show him things that he'll want to fill himself with. And again, these are all things that are smaller than a human consciousness, right? Like money, or food, or praise, or these are all things that are contingent upon human consciousness, and are therefore not God, right? It just feels like my biography. It just feels like the story of an addict. There's not a high I can name that I haven't made myself sick off of, whether it be this or that kind of narcotic, or praise, or food, or love, or sex, or money. I just feel that hollow inside me, and I just feel myself constantly trying to shove this or that shape into it, and it never fills the hole.

Hmm.

And the horizon towards which I march is filling it with whatever “that not me” ineffability of the universe is. “That not me” ineffability that I call God. But you know I'm not offended by whatever someone else wants to call it the universe, or the cosmos, or science, or love, or whatever community. That thing that is bigger than my own ego. That's the horizon towards which I march.

Beautiful. Finally, what's general advice that you would give emerging writers?

Read everything, read constantly.

Read, everything.

Yes, no one wants to hear it because it's just what you already know to be true. I think people want a shibboleth like if you walk around an ash tree 6 times on the third of June, at midnight, while chanting your mother's maiden name suddenly you'll be able to sell your novel, but it's just read constantly. Read everything. Read pulpy fiction, read self-help, read cookbooks, read literary. Just read everything. It's all going to pollinate.

Well, Kaveh Akbar, thank you so much. This has been just magical.

Thank you for being so generous. You were incredibly perceptive in your reading, and that means that you spent a lot of time with the book, which is a profound gift. Thank you so much for that.

Well, I loved it and this interview means the world to me. Thank you.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Photo by Paige Lewis