When I heard in our staff meeting that Molly McCully Brown was joining our team as editor in chief, I immediately started clapping. And she deserves the applause, all of it—a month in, Molly has brought to the table what we always knew she would bring: a practiced sense of wonder, a capacious literary sensibility, and of course, a generous helping of humor and verve. I’m excited to see how she’ll shape us as a community of readers, artists, writers, and spiritual wayfarers.

In her first interview as editor in chief, Molly and I talked about finding faith through art, building Image’s “long tradition of community” in new and complex ways, James Baldwin and Taylor Swift, and of course, what she’s reading and how she’s reading it.

Please join us in enthusiastic applause as we embark on this new chapter with Molly at the helm.

–Amanda Cordero, Marketing & Communications Associate

* * * * *

Amanda Cordero: Hi, Molly. How's it going?

Molly McCully Brown: Hi, Amanda. I'm good. How are you?

Amanda Cordero: I'm so good. I don't know about you, but I love autumn on the East Coast and it's beautiful here. I hope Wyoming is serving you well.

Molly McCully Brown: It is. It’s beautiful here too, although it’s a little last year at this time, we were about to get our very first snow and it’s still 70 degrees here, so I’m a little afraid. I don’t really know what’s happening.

AC: Oh, man. Yeah, I'm sure though, in January, you'll appreciate the last vestiges of warm weather.

MMB: Oh my God. So in love with it, and I wanted to hang around forever. I just don't trust it.

AC: Yeah, Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sitting down and having this conversation with me. I know that the entire staff and our readership and all of our image friends are so excited to welcome you as our new editor in chief, and we are just excited to get to know you more and hopefully this conversation is a touch point for that.

MMB: I'm so excited to talk with you.

AC: Great. So let's just go ahead and get started with your bio. Molly McCully Brown, our guest, our editor in chief, is the author of the essay collection, Places I've Taken My Body and the Poetry Collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susanna Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, Tin House, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. She's director of creative writing at the University of Wyoming, and of course, editor in chief of Image Journal. Thank you so much for being with us. Did I miss anything?

MMB: No, those were the highlights. Amazing.

AC: I also, that's the bio that we shared with everyone, and that's the bio that's on our website, but I have also had the privilege of meeting you in person and getting to know you through your work and through our staff meetings the last few weeks. So I would just love to share a personal anecdote with whoever's listening and watching to this conversation. But you and I met a few years ago at the Glen, and I have this distinct memory of sitting outside on the ground and drinking gin and tonics with you. Yeah, I think there was a particular rough patch during the Glen, and faculty and staff just needed to sit down and have a moment together. But I also just had the pleasure of getting to know you through your writing. And I know I shared this with you and staff a few weeks ago, but a few summers ago I was just really, really sad and I was getting used to moving to this new city that I had just moved into and was trying to figure out how to be an adult.

And yeah, I was just really sad. So I remember the whole summer just sneaking out of work early and driving to the closest beach on Long Island Sound and bringing your copy of Places I've Taken My Body and just sitting on the beach for hours on end, reading this essay collection and crying and reading some more and napping. And then when I was tired of doing all those things, like taking my body into the ocean and just swimming and floating and then crying some more, and then going back and reading your work. This makes it sound like a negative memory about your work, but honestly, your work and the theme of trying to locate yourself and your body and locate yourself in a particular place and seeking belonging within yourself and within different spaces just really resonated with me in that time. And so just thank you for what you've written and the ways in which your work has been such a companion to me. And yeah, I'm really thankful.

MMB: Well, thank you so much for that. I mean, obviously as a writer, the thing you want to hear is that your work meant something to a reader or readers at a particular moment in there lives. And that book, which is about among so many other things, the difficulty, but also the enormous joy and pleasure and centrality of taking one's body into particular landscapes, it's so wonderful to think about that book sort of with you on New England beaches when you needed it most. And so I thank you for bringing it there.

AC: Yeah, no, it's my pleasure. And when I was preparing for this interview, when I pulled out my copy again, I was flipping through all my dog-eared pages and I don't know if you dog-ear your books.

MMB: Oh yeah. My books are a mess.

AC: Yeah, same year. But yeah, I was telling a friend of mine, oh, I get to interview Molly, and he was like, "Oh, is this the writer who sat with you while you cried that whole summer?" And I was like, yep, that was her.

MMB: Oh, Amanda, that's really moving.

AC: Yeah. So speaking about places and spaces, I was wondering if you could read the first few paragraphs from your editorial statement in our new issue, issue 1 22, which will be landing in mailboxes very soon.

MMB: Yeah, absolutely. It was such a pleasure to get to write this before I even, I agreed to write this essay before y'all had even posted the job as editor in chief. And so it just feels so serendipitous to get to share it with you all now. And really this is an essay about a lot of things, but more than anything, I think it's an essay about the attention and the wonder that we owe one another and can have access to even, and maybe especially in times when wonder feels hard to come by, but it's also just an essay about driving through Nebraska, which is what you're going to hear in the beginning.

AC: Love it.

MMB: "Nebraskan Mystery." It can't be true that every town in the Midwest has a grain silo, but the 400 some miles between Laramie, Wyoming and Red Cloud, Nebraska would make you think so. Long, clear stretches of highway and farmland punctuated by concrete towers and clusters of capped steel bins, ladders on catwalk, spidering between them, some small collection of trucks circling constant, but unhurried in the back. Then a filling station, a few houses, an improbable post office, like a stray stucco spaceship crash landed by the side of the road. When my friend A and I make the seven-hour drive along Route six to a conference, a bank of near purple clouds in the left corner of the horizon follows us most of the way, but otherwise the sky is blue, the silos coming into view become a kind of ritual. Something is happening here, everything shines in the morning sun.

And I think of the opening lines of “Magnum Mysterium,” an early Lucie Brock-Broido poem, since I've lived in many places, it's odd that I continue to awaken in Nebraska, wandering into the sunroom where the wheat has come up wide overnight. Partly I know the poem is rising from my memory spurred by this landscape, little clapboard houses and high soft fields moving like water. But I am thinking at least as much about waken and wandering and wide as I am about wheat, all that consonance, the way the words roll into one another like waves, one mystery after another. Why do I find myself here of all places? How did it happen that when I slept, there was nothing? And now there's all of this.

AC: Thank you, Molly. I love this editorial statement, and I love how your writing is so hyper-specific to place, and in being hyper-specific also just seems to call attention to the places where the rest of us are, and there's a universality there. So yeah, something I love about the passage you just read is the wonder you experience in witnessing these silos, these things that seem ordinary all of a sudden become extraordinary. And I think your capacity to see something mundane, just all those silos coming up one after another, and then reimagining them as something remarkable, as something in their truest forms is one of the reasons why we asked you to join us as our editor in chief. So my first question for you is what is something you've encountered recently that has brought you wonder and has asked you to see the world differently?

MMB: I mean, I think that in my other life beyond being editor in chief of Image, I'm a teacher and the thing that I love and prize most about teaching is that in order to do it well, I think your job is to continually provide your students with a sense of wonder. I have a colleague who calls it "modeling the stoke," and what she means is that it is your job to go into the classroom pumped every day about the thing that you are teaching your students and the possibilities that are in front of them as readers and writers and imaginative of the world. But I think the thing that I am often most grateful for are the ways in which even when I go in thinking, okay, I'm going to be the one to deliver wonder here, I'm going to be the one to deliver enthusiasm and excitement.

My students are so often the people who make me take a second look at something that I had just overlooked. I'm teaching a fiction workshop this semester to undergraduates, which is very funny. I am not really a fiction writer, so I'm a little bit faking it till I make it. But one of the things that we've been talking about is time in literature, and I was teaching them a Tobias Wolf story I love—great Catholic writer, wonderful writer—a story called Bullet in the Brain, in which the remarkable thing about the story is that the bulk of the story takes place over what is really a fraction of a second in real time. You slow way, way down inside this character's head. And I've read this story so many times and I love it, but it's mostly sort of, I'm like, ah, yes, this is just how this story works.

Of course, this is how the works. But we were reading it again and one of my students just put his head down on the desk and was like, "I had no idea you could do that with time." I was like, "Oh, I had no idea that you could do that with time." And so that is my students make new to me again, always the possibilities of language. And I come in being like, all right, well, we're going to talk about the story and I'm going to give them an assignment, and this is an hour and a half long class, and then I have a meeting, but I always leave class just really newly moved by what language can do my students. They're the most daily and most regular and most ordinary source of wonder in my life, and I'm so grateful for them.

AC: Yeah, I love that. I'm a big believer in reading and community and doing creativity in community, and I just think, what is this all for if each other? And the act and practice of reading together and wondering and re-wondering together I think is so beautiful and something, and I'm so grateful that you get to experience with your students.

MMB:Yeah.

AC: Yeah. Okay, so now I want to take it back to the beginning. Can you tell us in as much detail as possible about the first time you encountered image?

MMB: Yeah. So you told me you were going to ask me this question, and so I spent a little time trying to think back, and one of the things that I realized is I actually cannot remember the first time I encountered Image.

AC: We were just always with you.

MMB: Yeah. And that's the thing is that I think that there's one way to read that that's like, oh, it wasn't significant. It wasn't crucial. But I actually think that much truer than that is this sense that actually I have been reading Image and carrying around that community and that way of thinking about the intersection between art and faith and mystery. To use our tagline really for as long as I can remember, one of the great pieces of luck in my life is that I was raised by parents who are also writers and artists, but I was also raised by parents who are not, they're not churchgoers and they're not particularly religious. When I got really interested in theology and was really thinking a lot about faith, I think they were sort of like, we don't really know what to do for you. One of the things they did know to do for me is to put Image in front of me and to give me a subscription to that journal. And so I think that is, I really found my way to faith through art, and I certainly found my way to faith in art through Image, and that feels like a huge privilege.

AC: Wow. Yeah. Can I ask, were there any particular pieces of art or literature in Image or not an Image that just helped click things for you?

MMB: Yeah, so I mean, I think the first time that I ever encountered a Christian Wiman poem was in the pages of Image. And Christian Wiman is one of the writers who has just again and again and again, and again and again, given me language to think about faith and in particular, language to think about the kind of both fraught and painful, but also incredibly resonant intersections of the corporeal body and faith. Christian Wiman is the longtime editor of Poetry Magazine and an extraordinary poet in his own right. And he's also someone who has lived for a very long time with terminal and incurable cancer. And so much of his work is sort of occupied with what does it mean to be like a mortal person in a failing, often painful body, and also have this and want to continue to be alive in the world that we're in, and also have this enormous faith and this very wrestling, very transforming relationship with God.

I describe myself often as the world's most conflicted and troubled Catholic. It is both crucial to me and also a system of theology that I'm continually wrestling with and wondering about and questioning. And I think all of Wiman's poems are so extraordinarily invested in what it means to be both faithful and doubting what it means to be both grateful and angry, what it means to be both loving and fragile, all of these convictions that anime our lives as artists, as people of faith. And he has in particular a poem called “Every Riven Thing,” which is a remarkable poem because the form of the poem essentially both stays the same and transforms over the course of the poem so that you reread the initial stance of the poem differently every time you really encounter it, which feels to me so much like being alive, right? Yes, we're having new and changing experiences, but we're coming back to the same fundamental realities about who we are and where we are. But every time we reconsider them, those realities change. And I think about that a lot in relationship to faith. I think about it a lot in relationship to teaching, and I think about it a lot just in relationship to being a person in a body in the world. And I'm so grateful, again, I think that the very first time I ever encountered his work was in Image, and his work has been such a lodestar for me. So yeah...

AC: No, same. I remember climbing this massive mountain earlier this year, and the book that I decided to with me on this multi-day trip was My Bright Abyss, and it was just strange—It was just a strange experience of being so aware of my body and my mortality and thinking about, because when you're just hiking, you're not thinking of anything. But what does it mean to be the person that I am, to be this person created the image of God, but to also just have sin and brokenness just floating all around. And then we would come back at night and I would read my Bright Abyss, and I don't know, it was…such…both an in body and out of body experience. I really need to just write to Chris Wiman and just say, thanks. Your work has been just so impactful. And yeah, you mentioned my write abyss in a couple of your essays, and yeah, I'm really grateful that you got to encounter him through Image's work. Yeah. Alright, so what new paths do you hope to take Image while at the helm?

MMB: Yeah, I mean, I think I said this in my little introductory letter to the community, but I think the thing that I mostly hope that we can do is build on the long tradition of community and complexity that has always characterized Image. This ability to have moments of tension and disagreement, animate things. This ability to have moments of just absolute gratitude and awe animate things, and the ability for awe and wonder and joy to coexist with anger and pain and difficulty and brokenness. And I hope to sort of build on that foundation while also just diversifying our roster of contributors and the shapes of the stories that we tell. I mean, I think that anytime you introduce a new voice into a conversation, a new person into a community, the thing that can happen is that community can get larger, wild, or weirder, more expansive.

And one of the things that we talked a lot about as I was interviewing for this position and sort of imagining what it would be like to do it is just wanting to just have as many access points as possible for folks to what Imag is and what it does both in the journal and on the page and beyond. And so if I hope that my tenure here is characterized by anything, I hope that is characterized by Image just becoming a bigger and bigger tent with more and more space to think through some of the things that are most urgent, but also maybe most difficult and fraught and complicated about our world right now together in an inclusive way.

AC: Yeah, no, I love that. And I've been with Image for I think five years now, and one of my favorite parts about it is just the friendships and the connections I've made, and some of my closest friends have been made through Image and some of my favorite writers I've encountered through Image. And I'm so excited about the fresh set of eyes and connections and what-have-you that you'll bring to Image. And yeah, I'm really excited to see what'll happen next. And our staff meetings have been so much fun, getting to bounce around ideas and the energy there, is just, there's something magical about it.

MMB: Yeah, I think everybody feels sort of like, oh, we sort of swung open a window here. And that's really exciting. Although also Sara just runs a great staff meeting.

AC: She does. One of my friends is like, “oh, I just love it when I find people who have the ping to my pong.” And I think that's what Image staff meetings oftentimes are.

MMB: Such a great phrase.

AC: All right, so what are some of your favorite pieces from the journal and why?

MMB: Yeah, mean, so there are a bunch of pieces that I really love, and I think that maybe the thing I want to do is actually just talk about the sections that characterize Image and why I think that they're also wonderful. So first of all, we have the best section editor team at Image, and I feel so lucky that I get to work with them and nominally lead them, but really mostly I just mean talk to them and try to draw out there. So Shane McCrae, who's our poetry editor, I think does a really wonderful job of curating just a really, really broad range of poems inside the journal. But every poem that he picks feels to me like its hinges are so visible. The thing I love about the poems and image is that they are such amazing machines and it's so wonderful to sort of see the way that they fit together.

And then Lauren Winner, who curates our nonfiction section, I think does a really beautiful job of both pulling together the kinds of essays that you might expect to see in a journal like Image in terms of, here's an essay about going on a kind of spiritual retreat to Italy and an experience in a monastery. We had sort of a beautiful piece in issue one, I'm going to say 120…that's probably wrong…that was about the experience of going to a monastery and sort of encountering a bunch of people at various inflection points in their lives. And it's such a small but extraordinary essay. But then there will also be sort of deeply surprising essays about crackers and church basements and family history. So there's huge range.

And then Melissa Prichard, who edits our fiction section. I think that one of the things that I loved as I was reading stories from that section was just that she's so drawn to strangeness. So all of the stories that show up in that section, you think where they're going. And almost always, I am wronged when I'm reading those that fiction. And so that feels really wonderful. And then we also, I mean, I think one of the things that's so interesting about the journal is that we also have really thriving culture and visual arts sections. And I think that this is a journal where I sort of always feel invited to think about what does art have to do with the world that we're living in a very pragmatic and very practical way. And Nick Ripatrazone, our culture editor, does such an incredible job of curating interviews and cultural essays and reviews that really feel always, to me, they're deeply tapped into something sort of urgent in the undercurrent of what's going on. He did an amazing interview just on the side that we got to put out on as a community update with Jamie Quattro about her new novel Two Step Devil, which is just so extraordinary. And I like hearing Nick in conversation with people, but also just sort of overhearing the conversations that he gets interested in is one of my favorite things.

And then Aaron Rosen, who's our visual arts editor. One of the things I was very clear about when I took this job is that I know much less about visual art in an expert way than I know about literature. But one of the things that I love about the pieces that Aaron chooses is that again and again, and again, and again and again, they are both striking and accomplish right off the bat. And then they also just reward continual study. And I feel like sometimes I'll look at a piece and the kind of spiritual underpinning of that piece will feel maybe not immediately clear to me, but then as I study it more, or as I read one of the beautiful in studio interviews with an artist that exists, I come to understand it really differently. And so that's a little bit of a cop out in your question maybe because it's just a way of saying that one of the things that I admire about Image is that almost always something in every piece is one of my favorites. But I also think—and this is something that I'm really excited to just lean into more—is that there's something magical that happens in the accumulation of all pieces, and particularly in the intersection of all of those sections and what they suggest. How these very, very different ways of seeing the world, making art, moving through it, thinking about what it is, do something magical, do something mystical.

AC:Yes. Yeah. And one of the things I love about Image is—yes to everything you just said—and also having my literary and artistic sensibility shaped so I'm not just repeating like, okay, I know this is what I like; I know that this is what the algorithm is going to feed me. But every time I open up the journal, there's just something new and surprising and unexpected that I didn't think I would pick up if I was just scrolling through Instagram or through my Twitter feed or whatever. But to have someone who's really just at forefront of their fields, whether that's in visual arts or culture criticism or whatever, telling me, "No, pay attention to this. This is something new and beautiful and good and surprising" is just, yeah, I don't know. It's not something that you can't get that really anywhere.

MMB:I think that we all are so well served by being willing to attend to not only what immediately strikes us as here, this is compelling, this is easy for me.

AC: I understand this.

MMB: Right? I immediately understand this. I'm immediately drawn to this. But in fact, I think we're often best served as artists, as citizens, as readers, as people, as practitioners of faith by attending most closely to the very things that maybe feel hardest for us to access or least immediately compelling or most complicated, or at least shaped for us. And I think that that's a wonderful thing about Image with all of these extraordinary people at the helm of all of these sections, and with the intersection of all of these kinds of ways of art making coming together, is that we have some help in that process at widening our gaze from where it might usually go. And that's a really extraordinary thing.

AC:Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, so before we get to our lightning round, which I'm so excited for, yeah...

MMB: I was happy I haven't heard any of the lightning round questions, so we'll see where it's going to go.

AC: It's going to be awesome. But I do have to ask, what is the biggest challenge image faces and what excites you the most about image's future and the work we're doing?

MMB: Yeah, I mean, I think that one, that a challenge that especially a journal like Image faces at this moment is that this is a moment in which—and again, this is something I talked a little bit about in my introductory letter—the world feels both at a really pivotal tipping point in so many ways. Obviously, we're in an election season in America, but also the so much is shifting and changing about technology. So much is shifting about the way we understand where we are in relationship to our climate so much is everything is just at this moment of transition. And it's also in a moment of increasing polarization and intensity. And I think that one of the things that Image has always been so good at and so concerned with is forging connection and community and dialogue and conversation across canyons, across distances, across faith traditions, across ways of thinking about or talking about something.

Here are a bunch of surprising approaches to a topic. And that is, it's what is so exciting and extraordinary and urgent about image, but it's also a really hard thing to be in the business of doing at this moment. And I think it's a thing that is going to mandate both sort of increasing levels of care and nuance, but also, as I said earlier, just an increasing range of the kinds of storytellers and interlocutors and artists and people that we're welcoming in, and an increasing range of thinking about what are the shapes for the kinds of stories that we're welcoming and telling. And that feels, I think, as is so often the case that feels like both the biggest challenge, biggest potential danger point, but also the thing that makes this moment feel so exciting. And also, the thing that makes it really easy for me to articulate this is exactly why we need Image in a moment like this, right? A space for having conversations that are incredibly nuanced, incredibly difficult, traversing between the spiritual and the political, the artistic and personal, all the traversing these spaces just in really, really urgent, beautiful, sustaining complicated ways.

AC: Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't have articulated it better, and thank you so much for joining me on this conversation. And I think the hard questions are, who knows, maybe the hard questions are just about to begin with this lightning round.

MMB: Yeah. I have a deep fear that you're going to ask me what my favorite book is, and that's actually, that's the hardest possible question.

AC: I think number nine might be a difficult question. Yeah, no, thank you, Molly. And are you ready? I don't know. I feel like maybe not, but we're going to do it. All right. All right. As quick as you can make 'em, 20 questions. Here we go.

MMB: Okay.

AC: What's on your nightstand?

MMB: Three books right now? Jamie Quatro’s, Two Step Devil, which I almost finished with and is extraordinary. And Eliza Griswold's, The Circle of Hope, which is a kind of extraordinary feat of reporting inside the evangelical community and thinking about religion and community and faith and politics in this particular moment. And then a novel that I just finished but haven't taken off the pile yet, I'm still thinking about it, which is Kimberly King Parsons’s We Are the Universe, which is a novel about grief and motherhood and community and what we owe ourselves in one another—and also contains one of the best descriptions of an acid trip that I've ever read in my entire life. So if that's appealing to you, go get it.

AC: Dang. We're going to have to talk about this at staff meeting. Alright, number two, best sandwich.

MMB: Oh my God. Best sandwich. So I really like horseradish, so really my answer is anything that like a turkey and horseradish, or beef and horseradish. Give me an onion, give me some horseradish. Give me some garlic. That's my situation.

AC: Dang. You're a woman after my own heart. All right. Favorite book as a child.

MMB: I was just talking about this with some friends. I really loved novels in verse as a child, which should tell you something about the person that I grew up to be. And this is a category like novels in verse for children. My very favorite as a kid was a novel called Out of the Dust, which is about the Dust Bowl, and it holds up, man. I looked back at it just a few years later and it's really extraordinary. So if you have a child who likes to read about American history and wants to do so in poems, go find a copy of that Out of the Dust for them.

AC: I'm sure there's a way you can just link everything down that mention at the bottom in this conversation.

MMB: I imagine it's still in print. It was a pretty award-winning book, so I think it's around. So cool.

AC: What's a hidden talent of yours?

MMB: I'm a person of actually sort of strikingly few talents is the thing, but I used to be really good at that…do you remember that game Bop It? That was big when we were kids. It was a machine and you had to push it, pull it, twist it. I was weirdly good at that game. It makes no sense. I was just very, very good at that game. Used to really be able to just pull it out as a party trick.

AC: Maybe it's like a practice of attention. You're just hyperfocused maybe.

MMB: But I was deeply uncoordinated, and so I doesn't make any sense. I don't know why I was so good at it. I was really good at it.

AC: All right, pet peeve of yours?

MMB: Ohhhhh, pet peeve. I mean, I think my biggest pet peeve is people who just are always certain that they're correct and willing to be unconvinced out of that. I feel like my general posture is that I have convictions that I feel, but also probably really I don't know anything. And I think that that posture of curiosity and doubt is one that has served me really well. And it's one that I find hard to, without it, I find it hard to really enjoy people.

AC: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Dream vacation?

MMB: Oh man. I know that I'm supposed to love getting away and being in restful contemplation, but the truth is that I am someone who actually, I just want to go on a vacation and do ninety-seven things. So I love to go to a city where I can go to museums and go to theater and go explore the history of a place. And I love, especially, if I can do that in a place where I've never been before so that I'm re-encountering. So my dream vacation is somewhere in metropolitan and new, I would say.

AC: Okay. Is there a particular city that you're like, dang, I would love to just—

MMB: I've never been to Prague and I kind of can't believe that I've never been to Prague and I have been thinking about that.

AC: All right. Next up on the list—guilty pleasure?

MMB: Oh man, I really like TV. I feel like we're maybe not supposed to say that is, but I actually think there's. And I like quote-unquote prestige television, and there's a lot of really extraordinary, I've been watching the new adaptation of Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, which is really interesting. But also I love a good cult documentary. I can get really into Wild Country or something. I think those communities are so fascinating. And I also think the sort of taxonomy of obsession and the way that that conviction spills over into something else is so fascinating. So yeah, cult documentaries maybe is my part.

AC: Nice. Yeah. Speaking about just TV that you're like, I don't know how I feel about this, but I'm going to be full send for it. I just finished binging the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives…

MMB: Oh! People recommended this to me and I feel certain that I would love it. And I also feel certain it would become one of those things where I was like, oh no, I watched twenty-five episodes at this television show in three days, and the shape of my life right now will not allow for that level of intensity. And so I'm holding it out there in the universe until I have seventy-two hours to watch all of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

AC: Thanksgiving break, Thanksgiving break, and then we'll reconvene and talk about it.

MMB: That, that's the dream. My dream for Thanksgiving break would be like, let's cook a giant meal with people. I love that. Then binge watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

AC: All right. Favorite ice cream flavor?

MMB: Mint chocolate chip.

AC: Okay, good one. What's a book you're embarrassed to not have read yet?

MMB: Oh man. Okay. I'm going to do that [thing]…there are plenty of books that I haven't…I've never made it all the way through Finnegan's Wake, which I feel like if you are a literature professor, that's one of the ones where they're like, oh, you're supposed to have done that. But I also a little bit reject. I actually think that being embarrassed about not having read things is, first of all, it's really elitist. And second of all, there are so many books in the universe and so much of what's been deeply, deeply canonized or held up as important are books that reinscribe very particular notions of identity and power. They're exclusively by white men. They sort of have a very particular notion of difficulty. And many of those books are extraordinary and excellent and wonderful, but I also think canonicity in that way shuts a lot of people out and narrows the kinds of stories that we tell. And so every time I find myself being embarrassed for not having read a particular text, I remind myself that it's because I've read something else that maybe outside powers weren't yet telling me was as important, but that that's actually a really important thing to have read.

AC: Yeah, great answer.

MMB: But also, I love, mostly the thing that I'm most embarrassed to have read is there are so many writers I adore who have new books out and I can't get to them all on the timetable that feels reasonable for me. And so mostly it's just like, oh, I can't believe I haven't read. I haven't read the newest, I can't believe I'm not even finished with Jamie Quatro’s novel yet that's been out for week. What's my deal? So that's the real sort of sense of embarrassment that I feel.

AC: Yeah. Okay. I do have to ask then about what is your ideal reading scenario?

MMB: So my ideal reading scenario, which almost never happens because life is life, is that I have multiple uninterrupted hours to just be like, I have a beverage or a rotating cast of beverages, and I have many hours on my couch, and my dog has been walked and has been outside and is just asleep with the kind of level of peace that people will never have access to underneath me. And I have hours and hours and hours to sink into a book. I think in some ways my ideal reading scenario hearkens back to what my relationship to reading was in childhood, which is that you could just lose whole days to that. And I so rarely get to do it, but it always feels like one of the great gifts of my life. And I'm also like, oh God, I'm like a smarter, better, more peaceful, more centered human being when I get to do that for extended periods of time. So even though it's not a thing that happens for me very often, I have really…One of my New Year's resolutions—and it's something I've actually stuck to, which almost never happens—was to start my day reading just a little bit every day, even for a couple of pages, a couple of minutes, because I like my brain better when how I begin, how I begin the day. So my ideal reading scenario is long stretches. My actual reading scenario is often fifteen minutes here, and fifteen minutes there. And however many pages of a book I can get through at night before I fall exhaustedly asleep. But reading is my favorite thing. It's the best thing.

AC: Said like a true member of the Image community, truly. All right, favorite poet?… One of your favorite poets.

MMB: Can't do it. I mean, I can't do it, so I cannot create a taxonomy. That's not possible. But I can tell you that the poet who brought me to poetry is Emily Dickinson. I have a very strong memory of discovering Emily Dickinson on my parents' bookshelf at eight and reading those poems and having absolutely no idea what was happening inside of them because I was eight. But understanding something very magical is going on here. And something about the sort of difficult yoke between our bodies and whatever else we are is being worked out here and something crazy is happening with sound, and I feel transported by the music of these poems. And I remember thinking, I want to do this for the rest of my life. And so Emily Dickinson is the poet who brought me to poetry who made me a poet. And I think in some ways that means that she will always and forever have to be my favorite.

But can't, you can't ask your favorite poet. That's a little bit like being like, “who's your favorite person that you know?” Can't do that. I love a lot of people who would be mad at me if I said that. And also we need different things at different times. So I need certain kinds of poems and certain kinds of poets at various moments. And it is one of the greatest sources of joy and continual gratitude in my life that I can always reach for a poem and I can always reach for such a broad array of poems and poets.

AC: Yes. All right, then I'm going to tweak perhaps this next question. Favorite essayist or the essayist who brought you to the essayist that you are today?

MMB: I think that I like a lot of people in a very particular way. I came, one of the ways that I came to sort of the intersection between personal nonfiction and nonfiction about the world was through Joan Didion. And nobody does it like Didion, and she was an extraordinary figure for me. I also think I came to nonfiction through James Baldwin.

AC: Oh, so good.

MMB: He has been a really, really foundational thinker and also stylist. For me, Baldwin's prose is so just absolutely emotive and excellent and shining without ever being showy. And I just like that is an extraordinary thing. Yeah, I, so those are two really foundational essayists for me. But again, in terms of contemporary, I can't do it, man. There are too many extraordinary people.

AC: No, I totally get it. I totally get it. Okay. Maybe this next question will be easier. Favorite Taylor Swift Swift album? Unless you don't like Taylor Swift…

MMB: No, I mean I do. So I'm in it. I really liked that first out, I listen to a lot of country music actually as a thing—

AC: Me too!

MMB: I mean, again, I consider myself a southern writer. I grew up in the south country. Music is a foundational part of my life and childhood. And I also think the storytelling and country music is so central and so interesting. And it has a complicated relationship with many, many things, including problematic nostalgia. But it's wonderful. So I really loved that first album. But then I think the album that came to me in the sort of moment of the height of my emotional need as a person for Taylor Swift was Red. And so that's the album that I go back to most, I would say.

AC: Love that. I also think her debut album might be my favorite album. The writing in it is just so good.

MMB: Is she ever going to re-record that one? Come on!

AC: We're putting it out there. We'll have our people call her people. Alright. If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would it be?

MMB: I mean, maybe Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, and James Baldwin. How much would you pay to have all of those people in a room speaking to one another?

AC: I would pay a lot, lot of money.

MMB: I feel like it was a dinner, which I wouldn't have to say literally anything. I would just want to be in a corner eating my pasta and just seeing what happened when those people spoke to one another.

AC: Absolutely. Alright, fill in the blank. Compared to the average Joe, I know more about…

MMB: I mean, not so much. Again, my general posture is, one of the things I love about being a writer is that you get to sort of delight in knowing a little bit about a lot of things. You get fascinated with something and become sort of an absolute jack of all, jack of all trades. And then you're like, oh, I know just enough about that to write something about it. And then I'm going to go on a little, what do I know really a lot about besides the things that characterize my professional existence? Yeah. No, I don't know. I feel like I know a little bit, I know a little bit about a lot of things and I'm an expert in almost nothing.

AC: Okay, okay. Okay. Alright. What's a word you hate?

MMB: Okay, I'm cheating a little, this is a phrase, not a word, but I had a friend in graduate school who I love and adore and is a wonderful person, but he would, instead of describing things as room temperature, he would regularly describe things as "hand temperature." And I was like, "You have to stop doing that." That's something about that is just deeply horrible to me in a way that I, no thanks. And of course the problem with letting someone know that it skeeves you out when they say something is that then it's delightful and fun. And so then he would just find large excuses to describe things with hand temperature. And every time I was like, “stop it.” I really despise that phrase, and it's still the thing that comes to mind when people are like, what language do you hate? Or what skies you out? I'm like, “oh, hand temperature.” No thanks.

AC: I think I would have to agree with that. Gross, hand temperature. What's a word you love? Or a phrase you love?

MMB: The word infinitesimal, right, is like a thing that I love. The infinitesimal as in one way, it's the sort of opposite of infinite, right? It's like the thing that is very, very, very, very, very, very, very tiny. But the thing that I have always loved about infinitesimal as a piece of language is that it holds infinite inside of it. And so the thing that always feels so clear to me about the word infinitesimal is that it is aware of the very smallest things as actually holding an infinity inside of them and being possessed of a infinity of significance. And that is a cool thing about language and a word that I really love.

AC: I love that. Yeah. I love that. Your ideal weekend consists of what three things? Three components.

MMB: My ideal weekend, is that what you asked? Reading, sunshine, rotating cast of beverages. This is very connected to my ideal reading experience. Continual beverages, sunshine, a good book.

AC: Love that. Yeah, actually same. All right. Favorite indie bookstore?

MMB: Oh man. So I will forever spend the rest of my life plugging Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, which is just one of the best independent bookstores in the country. It's run by extraordinary people. They do an enormous number of author events, and so they bring people in and really, they make community available to people in this town. This is where I went to graduate school and I was like, there's the biggest gift of my life was to go to graduate school in a town where the people who ran the independent bookstore were bringing in all of these extraordinary writers. And then were also saying, “please hang out in the bookstore after hours and please come to these parties at our house that we're throwing for these writers, and please tell us who your goddaughter is, or your nephew or niece is, and we'll go to the back of our children's bookstore and pick out the perfect book.” They're really extraordinary. Richard and Lisa Howorth, who run it, are wonderful. The staff is amazing and it's warm. And when I think about where's home, I think in some ways home will always be Square Books in Mississippi.

AC: Oh man, shout out to Square Books for doing the Lord's work, it sounds like.

MMB: But so many indie bookstores are doing the Lord. I think that I love nothing more than an indie bookstore, and I've never been in an indie bookstore that I didn't feel like, oh God, this is where the good things are happening. So yeah. So that's my home indie bookstore. But really, if you run an indie bookstore, you are doing Lord’s work. And I love you and I'm grateful for you every day.

AC: Truly, truly. Alright, final question. Fill in the blank. I can't resist…

MMB: Oh man. I can't resist a beautiful day. If the weather is beautiful outside, I have to go be in it. The flip side is that I'm one of those people who, if it's raining and cold for a long time, I begin to believe that maybe all the joy in the universe has been sucked out of it. But a gorgeous day, almost no matter what is happening in my life or in the world, I am convinced by the weather that we're all going to be just fine and joy is coming. Right?

AC: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Molly, I think that's it for us. I hope you still get some hours in your day to enjoy the beautiful weather.

MMB: Yeah. Amanda, thanks so much for having this conversation. I hope it's the first of many and it was really just lovely to talk with you.

AC: Thank you. Yeah. And we're all excited to read issue 122. If you haven't gotten a chance to subscribe yet, please do so. Molly's editorial statement is one of many, many, many gems that are in this issue. And yeah, thanks again, Molly.

MMB: And if you have subscribe, it should be in your mailbox now or really soon.

AC: Yes. And it'll be online very soon, if not already by the time this interview goes out. So thank you, Molly. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for joining us on staff, and thank you to all of our Image readers and friends for joining in on this conversation.

MMB: Thanks, Amanda.