Morgan Parker is perhaps best known for her three acclaimed collections of poetry—Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also has to her name a Young Adult novel, Who Put This Song On?, as well as an acclaimed collection of essays, You Get What You Pay For.
With degrees in both creative writing and anthropology, Morgan Parker weaves various anthropological ideas and practices throughout her work, using them as a lens through which to explore her life. This allows readers to better understand the emotional distress Parker experiences in the wake of her ancestors’ trauma during the years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and Jim Crow. Morgan Parker’s rigorous attention to craft offers readers a precise and imaginative rendering of her experience as a Black woman living in the present. This is a gift.
In February 2026 Morgan Parker came to Butler University as a visiting writer and sat down with Booth to talk about outside interventions, using herself as an argument, and finally saying her piece.
Susan Lerner (SL): I want to start with a question about your writing process. I don’t write poetry, so I have to confess that all this is like magic to me. In a conversation with Vivian Lee in The Rumpus, you described your writing process as self-translation, that you start with a tone and an attitude. Do the tone and attitude then allow image and language to enter the space? Am I asking this in a way that’s even close to comprehending this?
Morgan Parker (MP): Yeah. It’s a matter of locating the tone and thinking about what kind of content will bolster that tone. I often don’t know where a poem will go. I can start with an idea, but if I’m doing it right, the poem will change my idea. And if I begin with an idea that’s too constricting, it creates a writing process in which I’m just trying to do that thing, whereas if I start with an idea and direction, I’m able to pivot as the poem unfolds. As a new image comes up, I try to follow that direction.
When I write, I try to tune in to what the poem is asking of me, to believe and trust that the poem sometimes knows better than I do. I revise my own work often. This is something I talk a lot about with my students. They tend to focus on their original idea when they revise, even when that original idea is not what is actually happening in the poem draft.
And sometimes the poem comes to demand more from me than I am prepared to give. I’ve learned to try to honor that, rather than resist it or take an easier way.
SL: How does form enter this process?
MP: Sometimes form is where I start, but it’s often one of the first things I look at when I’m revising. It’s an easy way to start thinking about altering what you have on the page. Is the form correct? One of the exercises I do is put a poem in a totally different form. If it’s in one stanza, I’ll break it up. If it’s short lines, I’ll make it long lines. I play around a lot with form to make sure the poem has the right package, that the form is supporting the content as best it can—to see what happens, how it changes the language and what’s emphasized.
SL: Everything I’ve read by and about you has included references to your very contentious relationship with linear time. You weave aspects of this all throughout your writing, and it’s something you’ve spoken about in interviews. You commented to Isaac Fitzgerald that linear time is rude. In a McSweeney’s interview with Jesse Nathan, you said that time is fake. In other conversations you’ve remarked that linear time is white, that it’s a construct, and that it’s a structure placed over our experiences. Can you tell me how your relationship with time informs your writing?
MP: My artist’s statement is that I am trying to capture or reflect my experience in this body, during this time in the world. And yet, my experience of the world is very layered. As I experience the present, I’m also interacting with history, with possible futures, and with ancestry. So while I’m focused on representing my contemporary experience, my contemporary experience is one of a collapse of time.
I try to get at a particular type of déjà vu that speaks to the cyclical nature of social structures, cultural events, and even feelings. For instance, I might have a particular feeling and think about an ancestor of mine who might have had the same feeling, just in a different context. I try to locate moments when there is a collapse of time or an overlapping of events to show that we don’t exist as only moving from point A to point B, and only in this current timeline. We all interact with the past in very present ways. I’m really committed to reminding readers of how that shows up—especially for me.
SL: You mentioned ancestors, so I want to ask about a conversation you had with Rachel Long in Granta. You spoke about your book Magical Negro and said that you didn’t know how a lot of those poems happened. You described your experience by saying there were voices that wanted to come through and that you had to let them.
As a way to explore this, I want to read you a sentence written by another writer. I recently read Rachel Eliza Griffith’s new memoir, The Flower Bearers. This sentence comes from a part where she reflects on the loss of her dear friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon. Griffith wrote, “Reading, writing, and living inside of our shared yet distinct stories kept a touch of ancestors on our lips and tongues.”
Is this sentence pointing to something similar to what you are saying? I realize you can’t speak for Griffith, but I thought her prose could maybe spark a discussion about your experience of porous time and ancestors.
MP: I know Rachel Eliza and Aisha, and they were really close. When we lose friends who are contemporaries, they can become ancestors. I imagine that for Rachel, writing about Aisha and about their friendship was a way to keep her close. I’m currently writing about a friend who I lost. It is a way to connect with them across the veil. There’s a way that writing opens up a magical space where we can connect with voices and spirits that are outside of our everyday reach.
With Magical Negro, I really did find that I didn’t know where some of the poems came from. I didn’t remember having the idea for certain lines. This was the book of poems that I talked about in your earlier question, the one that would ask of me more than I could give. I had to learn to trust that. To make myself into the vessel those poems could come through. So that I could honor other voices that came before me or voices I’m connected to that couldn’t speak. There is a bit of magic and spirituality to the idea of making writing and reading a space ancestors can join, to the idea that there’s is a spiritual mode in making these deep connections—especially through very personal work. There are interventions that happen.
SL: What do you mean by interventions?
MP: Outside interventions. Like when there are lines I feel I did not write. In my writing, I’ve tried to get closer to those moments. To capitalize on them, rather than being afraid and moving away. The deeper we get into understanding ourselves, the more it helps us understand those who came before us.
In so much of Magical Negro I wanted to talk about how history unfolded and how that has influenced me. There was a lot that I couldn’t do on my own. Writing in this way keeps the ancestors close. We become the only voice they have on this earth.
SL: Do you feel that you are part of an ongoing lineage?
MP: Definitely. There’s a present-day lineage, like Rachel Eliza Griffith, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and Clint Smith. It’s wonderful that so many Black writers are working at the same time. We’re in touch with each other and read each other’s work, and because we’re all tapping into different parts of the Black experience, I feel like I have permission to reflect on my own particular slice. Being aware of my contemporaries and peers helps me to be able to dig in fully to the part of my life I can reflect on and represent. Having said that, the work of individual Black writers is meant to be put together. When you read Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Rachel Eliza Grifith, you get a clearer, more nuanced, and larger picture of the Black experience.
The other part of lineage is to understand what has come before. I’m certainly not the first person to feel what I’m feeling and to try to express this. I’m aware that I’m adding to a course that already exists and that this course will continue to exist. I ask myself, “How I might add to that conversation?” This is a way of immersion in the past that sets something up for the future. I’m already thinking about younger poets I’ve seen come behind me, some of whom have been influenced by my work. It’s just incredible to see. I can only take the work so far. Another generation comes forward and finishes the work you’re doing. And I’m finishing the work that started before me. Writing becomes larger than one’s own life.
SL: I want to ask about how you use details from your personal life in your writing. Going back to that great conversation you had with Vivian Lee in The Rumpus, you said that it is important to you that readers contextualize the personal details you include. That you want the personal details about your life to be seen as a record of how you feel within the “official” record of Black America. And this got me thinking about your degree in anthropology. And then I reread the first few chapters of You Get What You Pay For. It struck me as so clear that when you introduce the young version of yourself to the reader, it’s as if you are an anthropologist describing a cultural specimen. Can you tell me how the anthropological ideas of documentation and ethnography inform how you bring your personal life into your writing?
MP: I wrote that book as an auto-ethnography, with me as the “anonymous” case study. I used the details about my life to prove a larger point. They are not a confession, and they don’t only serve as documentation of my existence—although that’s part of it. The details give readers a real-life example of issues we don’t always personalize. It’s easy to talk about reparations in vague and impersonal terms, so it was important to me that I break down for readers how I experience myself in the world. How I’ve navigated it. And also to delineate all the forces that led to my existence. What I was born into. About my experience of coming up against different cultural structures. How therapy has worked and not worked. It’s like I wrote a sociology book, and all the examples are me. This was the best way I knew how to make an argument. Because I understand myself deeply, I can use myself, and the personal details from my life, as an argument.
SL: As you spoke about how you use the personal details of your life in your writing, I was reminded of the criticism of personal writing in discussions around memoir. Regardless of how anyone feels about the arguments against personal writing, none of that applies to you because you’re using your personal life as a tool.
MP: Yes, I’ve found that the best way for me to write about larger things is to go through my own personal experience. This is certainly what is most impactful to readers. In the writing of You Get What You Pay For, I felt important to couch my claims and arguments in my personal experience, which meant that I had to offer a lot of personal details. Who can argue with my lived experience?
SL: I wanted to ask about argument, that your work makes an argument. That led me to think about a line from “And Cold Sunset,” one of the incredible poems in Magical Negro, which is, “my body is an argument I did not start.” But I was having trouble finding my way into a question. And then I listened to one of my favorite interviews of you, which is with David Naimon—
MP: So good.
SL: Yes! An incredible interviewer. On his Between the Covers podcast, he mentioned that line, too, and used it as a way of exploring how you use argument in your art. I need to tip my hat to David Naimon here because his question helped me find my own way into mine.
I want to talk to you about the end of You Get What You Pay For. You’ve written a book-length argument that reparations could be offered in the form of free therapy, but here you take readers to an interrogation of your relationship with your own trauma. At the very end, you put yourself in the position of needing to defend the validity of all of your claims that racial trauma impacted and shaped your life in terrible and detrimental ways, and it seems ironic that it is other writers who have backed you against a wall. They’ve made comments about trauma, that it’s material for writing, that they wish they had this material to use. Or they’ve asked what you would write about if you hadn’t experienced trauma. So in response to their ludicrous ideas that trauma is a gift and that it somehow defines you, you begin with a really powerful litany of self-declaration. That litany, your defense—I really loved it. I think litany must be one of your superpowers.
MP: (Laughs.) That’s from poetry.
SL: It was so artful and effective. They’re throwing bullshit at you, but you refuse to capitulate. You acknowledge your trauma without letting it define you. Do I have that right?
MP: Yep. And that it doesn’t make me.
SL: Yes. So powerful. And now I’m not even sure what my question is. But I’d love for you to talk about how you wrote the ending of You Get What You Pay For.
MP: I wasn’t sure how the book should end because its story doesn’t have an ending. The end of the book is the beginning of a conversation. I knew early on that if this book had any kind of happy ending, it had to be an acknowledgment of both the trauma and the glory that are part of my birthright. This felt like the most positive note I could end on.
But I knew I wanted to address some of the things folks have said to me like, “What would you write about if you didn’t have this trauma?” and “I wish I had that trauma.” For that writer to think that if they had trauma, they’d be a better writer, is absurd and offensive. And I thought that maybe there would be some readers who had similar thoughts. So I didn’t want to exit the book without pushing against those kinds of comments. It felt important for me to acknowledge all that, to say, I don’t need this trauma; I am whole without it. I wanted to end the book with my arguments against these comments, and I wanted the tone to be sure and certain.
SL: We’ve spoken about your relationship with time, and so now I have questions about your relationship to facts. In a piece in The Believer, called “The State of the Fact,” Joshua Wolf Shenk invited various writers to talk about facts. In your contribution, you discounted facts altogether. You said, “Facts are white,” and “Facts are not for me.”
I couldn’t help but think about “Plantations,” your powerful essay in You Get What You Pay For. One of the blurbs on the back of the book is from Clint Smith, who gave a reading here at Butler just two weeks ago. His larger project focuses on exploring the ways countries—especially ours—remember their histories and what the nature of these remembrances mean within the context of history. He also toured plantations, but there was something about how you described your tour of the Gamble Plantation that really gutted me. I could barely stand to stay with you as the tour guide offered up those myriad facts about tabby—the material used to build the plantation—without ever adding any facts about the nature of the labor that transformed that tabby into the plantation. It seemed to me that this tour could be the poster child for a literal interpretation of your declaration that facts are white.
MP: Yeah, it’s insane to me that a talk about a plantation would barely mention slaves. But that’s what they did. This also came across in the way he talked about the renovation of the plantation and what they chose to reconstruct. They did not reconstruct any slave cabins, but they did put in a place where people could get married. That says it all. What do we want to remember and what do we choose to remember? And who decides this?
We’re seeing this erasure of history more and more. It’s very easy to see how certain things get erased, reworded, or rebranded. A slavery exhibition in Philly was just taken down. On the Gamble Plantation tour, the tour guide called the enslaved people there “workers.” This is happening all around us, and a lot of the time people don’t even notice it. It is important to acknowledge that truth is being manipulated.
SL: That reminds me of your essay about the Bob Jones University case, when he referred to how slaves “came” to America.
MP: As if we packed a lunch and came over, right? It’s wild when you open up your eyes to the ways we soften things or ignore them altogether. It’s definitely a rewriting. In the United States, that is definitely a function of whiteness and white supremacy. It only helps white supremacy to erase certain histories and rebrand certain things. What even is the truth?
SL: In The Believer piece you also spoke about myth-making. That part of your project is to make your own myths. How do you go about doing this?
MP: I think about my own history and our country’s history and look for moments to expand on. I look for pockets of space that exist around things that haven’t been written about or written into. I think about digging into traditions we’re not always aware of to create space and voice for other kinds of myths and other kinds of legacies.
And I ask myself about the truths and myths I live by, which are not the same truths and myths I had been taught to live by. I divorce myself from what is no longer true and important. And I rethink: If that is no longer important to me, then what is? And how can I be in touch with that?
SL: That strikes me as really courageous.
MP: Yeah. It’s the hard way, for sure. It’s definitely the hard way.
(Both laugh.)
Authenticity is a challenge. It’s not always rewarded—especially now. There’s so much emphasis on hiding who one really is. Of putting on the best show or face. It’s not encouraged to be super authentic or to know yourself deeply.
SL: That kind of depth is not the level of discourse we engage in, generally.
MP: Generally, yeah. White supremacist capitalism doesn’t benefit from us being in touch with our authentic selves. If we’re all part of an easily manipulated and distracted monolith, we’re easy to control.
SL: In the past, you’ve expressed a concern about an unwillingness on the part of people to engage with your poetry with regard to aspects other than its content. The discussions about your poetry have often centered around the content’s connection to a cultural conversation about Blackness. You often get tasked with responding to personal questions, like how you’re feeling, or political questions, like how you think America should be feeling, all of which you’ve said becomes boring and exhausting.
MP: Yes. (Laughs.)
SL: I get it. You’re not the spokesperson.
MP: No, I’m not the person to ask.
SL: So given that, I’m curious about the quality and shape of the discourse around You Get What You Pay For. Your poetry sparkles with such meticulous craft around word choice, word play, and form. These are some of the same things that make your essays shine. How have those conversations been?
MP: Essays, especially personal essays, invite readers to use the author as an entryway. It’s something I talk about with other female writers. The questions we get at Q&As are often way more personal than the ones our male counterparts get. When men are interviewed, they’re often asked about the book, and when women are interviewed, it’s like, “Who are you dating?” It’s really wild. Audiences desire the interiority of female writers. And obviously the essays invite that, more so than do the poems. I definitely got a lot of questions about myself, about my past and history. Lots about my personal experiences in therapy. And I still get a lot of “What do you think the answer is?” and “What should we do?” Again, I’m not a politician. I’m a writer. I’m reflecting. I’m telling you what I’m seeing, what the problem is.
I did get a lot of questions about what kind of actions people should take. I don’t necessarily think that’s what the book was asking, but my answer was always, “Pay attention to other people. Be aware that other people are around. Acknowledge them. Consider what someone else’s perspective might be.” So much of the book was about feeling dismissed and ignored. I think a way that we can all grow is to grow our empathy, to understand that we’re on this planet with a lot of different types of folks. It’s better when everyone is seen. That was my biggest takeaway—notice other people. And go to the doctor, if you need to.
(Both laugh.)
Get your therapy if you need to. Care for the people in your community. It’s funny how people want a bigger thing, like for me to tell them to go march. But one thing I learned while writing this book is that the answer to a lot of the big questions are small, at least in terms of what is actionable daily.
I’m always eager for more craft questions, but I think that because I’m in this body and writing about this body, folks want to hear the ins and outs of how I feel about my identity and how they should feel about my identity.
As to the level of craft in this book, I moved words around like crazy. Certain sentences were reworked and reworked and reworked. Everything I was saying was so important to me, and I wanted to be as precise and concise as possible. I wanted to know that when the book came out, I had done my best to articulate how I feel as truthfully and emphatically as possible. That once and for all, I had said my piece. I made my offering.
SL: You did.
MP: (Laughs.) Thank you. It was not an easy one.