In 2016, writer and poet Ross Gay began writing daily essays about people, places and experiences that filled him with delight. Born from that was, “The Book of Delights,” a collection of thoughtful and wondrous micro-essays exploring everything from the mundane to being a person of color in public spaces to unlikely interactions with strangers. Roughly five years later, he went on this journey again in his forthcoming collection, “The Book of (More) Delights.”

At the heart of Gay’s work is joy, but not in the cheesy, depthless way we discuss it sometimes. But heart and body joy. Joy that makes space for important questions about the power dynamics in this country, joy that makes space for grief, joy that makes space for interrogating our own complicated place in the world. I spoke with Ross Gay about his journey writing daily delights, how it has impacted his writing practice and why Black and joy are synonymous.

Can you talk a little bit about what inspired you to embark on the daily practice of finding and reflecting on things in the world for both books?

The 1st book I wrote between August 1st 2016 and August 1st 2017. And it’s funny as I think about this because people ask me this question quite a bit, and as I think about it, it changes a little bit over time. One of the things that I was conscious of after the book before this came out, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” was that people were sort of interested in these more complicated considerations of things like joy. I wasn’t thinking that until the book was out and people told me like, oh, you’re writing about joy. So then I started thinking, oh, this is an interesting thing to be writing about many things, but among those things being that which delights me. There was some sense of like, oh, this will be interesting for a readership. But, of course, for me, it was also as all my writing is, I’m curious about what delights me. What will I discover? What would it mean for me to do that every day for a year, think about what delights me every day?

Has writing “The Book of Delights” and “The Book of (More) Delights” shifted your relationship to the world around you? Did you become more present, or was that just always a part of your practice as a writer?

It was definitely not always part of my practice in the same way. I think some of the stuff that I’ve learned as a writer is to pay very close attention, in terms of trying to describe things and trying to look very closely at things. But in terms of a practice of noticing, articulating and wondering about what it is that I love, I don’t think I knew that, or I should say, that has been a thing that I’ve understood as an objective of this writing/spiritual/communal endeavor. I’ve been trying to write really good poems. I’ve been trying to write really good essays, but I don’t know if I would have believed that a significant part of my objective is to notice, articulate, wonder about, and share what I love through my writing. So, that feels substantial. That feels like something I really learned.

When you think of the term that we hear a lot, Black joy, what does that mean to you? What immediately do you see or envision?

I have a friend who’s a sort of theologian. He’s a beautiful writer named J. Cameron Carter, and we talk about this stuff a lot. And two years ago, I was sitting in on his class. He’s my colleague here at Indiana University, but I took his class and found myself texting him, and the text was something like, oh, Blackness and joy are the same thing, and this is a version of a definition of Blackness that I love. . .I appreciate or understand that definition as the experience or the understanding of a kind of fundamental, profound, ultimate connection that Blackness, in fact, refuses the ideas of purity, and it refuses the idea of separation. Joy itself is a kind of refusal.

Blackness is to me, it is a kind of awareness of fun, I like that definition of Blackness. I should say of a kind of fundamental entanglement that we do not get through this alone, that we are not made by ourselves, that we are not individual actors working through the world, but we are actually part of a choir or a swarm or a whatever the word is that implies a kind of beyondness that we can’t conceive of, but that we can sort of acknowledge and practice being in gratitude to. That’s also to say that, I think in certain ways, a beautiful quote that I love is Toi Derricotte’s quote, ” Joy is an active resistance.”

I love that quote. But I also feel like actually joy is bigger than resistance. Joy is bigger than that which it allegedly resists. Joy is before the need to resist, joy is sort of the ground, and I think probably there might be a notion of Black joy that is joy in the midst of struggle and that seems good, but more I’m sort of like, it’s actually before that. It prefigures the struggle.

Want to read more of Ross Gay’s delightful work? Find his latest collection as well as his others at the Black Joy bookshop.