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Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi. I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome back to the FoST podcast.

My guest today is celebrated poet Jasmine Mans. Jasmine joined the FoST community in 2015 as a member of the FoST Fellows Program, our incubator for young storytelling talent. Since then, her following has exploded, earning her a book deal with Penguin Random House and a mention on Oprah's list of Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Her recently released poetry collection, Black Girl, Call Home, is a vivid, captivating, and lyrical depiction of what it's like to grow up as a black girl in America and offers deep introspection into the meaning of home.

Part of Jasmine's lyricism comes from her origins as a spoken word poet. She started competing in slam poetry competitions as a teenager and came to prominence through a series of YouTube videos in which she delivered poems addressing modern icons, such as Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Michelle Obama. Jasmine joins me today to discuss her new collection, her artistic process, and the realities of being a poet in the age of the internet. I'm thrilled to welcome her to the FoST podcast.

Jasmine Mans, it is such a pleasure and a delight to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Jasmine Mans:

The pleasure is mine. I'm always excited to chat with you, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, thank you. It's so nice to see you and have you here. So, I have this sense of the first time that I saw you perform live, and it was on the FoST mainstage, and you got on that stage and you performed this beautiful poem that you'd written to Michelle Obama. It was kind of a thank you to her. And you did this extraordinary job. You truly brought down the house at FoST. And I don't know why, but I just had this incredible sense of emotion, and… pride, which is totally out of place, because I don’t know why... but just the beauty of you performing. And so I guess I was just wanting to start with that. I think that was, what, back in 2015, 2016? It was years ago. And just to ask you about that poem, right? That was something that you had written I think, what, back in college? What was the origin of that particular poem?

Jasmine Mans:

I wrote that in the Witte dorm room in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and, one, it's a testament to how far a piece can travel. I remember exactly where I was when I wrote that poem. I was in love with her. I thought she was incredible at the time I was in college. I was able to vote for Barack Obama in the second election for a second term. And it was at the height of seeing Michelle Obama in the public eye and seeing how people interpreted her as one of the highest positions that a woman and a wife can hold in America, right? And I never met her, but that piece remains such a sensitive and a beautiful part of my portfolio that I enjoy. I enjoy sharing it. I enjoy how little girls feel about it. I enjoy how it makes me feel. And so I'm grateful that I spent those extra days in my dorm writing that.

Dear First Lady, I watched as my four-year-old cousin, as she sat in the mirror, placed my grandmother's pearls around her neck and said, "Do I look like Michelle Obama?" This little girl, who does not know how to say Rice Krispies or macaroni and cheese properly, said your name as if it existed in her long list of heroes in between Snow White and Santa Claus. My little cousin does not know Jim Crow, how to interpret the constitution or fight for human rights. She does not know your views on healthcare reform…

Charlie Melcher:

And so you are recently the author a beautiful book called Black Girl, Call Home, a collection of your poems. And I know you originally as a spoken word poet. That's where we first found each other, where I first found you, and you came to FoST. Tell us a little bit about the process of being a poet where your medium is the printed page, versus working for the stage.

Jasmine Mans:

I remember a point in my career as a performance artist, as a slam poet. And when you do spoken word or slam performance, it's very niche. And it is very two different mediums to be a spoken word performer and to be in the literary medium. Like, it comes from the same place – I write, I speak, right? But as far as the mediums, right, they are two different mediums that are very much so worth celebrating and culturally connected, like when you think about folklore and when you think about bebop and those things are connected to black folks and native traditions. And the spoken word became an art form, in a sense, for people who couldn't write stuff down. And so we were always trying to find a way to honor both, to honor what we know, what we were raised on ,the spiritual kind of medium, as well as the medium that supports the livelihood of the artists.

Charlie Melcher:

Talk to me a little bit about your early days, where this comes for you, how you became a poet and realized you were one.

Jasmine Mans:

Truth be told, 30 years old right now, right? And some of my earliest days as a professional were 10 years ago, where we were trying out poetry on YouTube, and for the first time putting our catalogs of work on YouTube and watching people outside of our main circles view it. And that was a really big phenomenon. And that's what made me a professional. And so media, social media, is so important to my growth because Facebook started sharing, and there was no other platform that was sharing faster than Facebook at the time. And so you could see a thought and idea, get a million shares in a day, hours. And so that was huge.

And at the same time, we're learning how these mediums work. We're learning how Facebook even goes, and we're learning how YouTube works. We don't at this point 10 years ago exactly know what a hashtag is. Now you see catalogs of poetry sitting on YouTube, and it's building the careers and coloring the careers of myself. And all the while, I’m in college, writing poems in college, and not knowing what this is doing, what this is building up to. And you're seeing now, 10 years later, I'm talking to you, and there are millions of views gathered around some of these poems that I've written because they were catalogued because they were all so timeless. And so media and storytelling is where I started.

Charlie Melcher:

And it's amazing, again, if you think about it, poets who started in the written word and hoped... I remember when I was in high school and college, my best friend was a poet. Literally, that's what he aspired to. And the path you had to go through then, you would write a poem and you would submit it to one of a small number of poetry magazines, and you'd be rejected forever. And then you'd get one published and they'd send you whatever, a check for $25 and that was it. It was so hard to break in and have access. And as you said, the internet came and you could put a YouTube video up and your poem could be viewed by a million people over, whatever, some short amount of time. It really sort of opened up the door for you and for generations of artists to be able to express themselves. It's a beautiful thing. Tell us a little bit about the process of writing the book.

Jasmine Mans:

Yes. My first book that I published, it wasn't nationally distributed and I think we only printed about maybe 2000 copies that I sold and hustled all through college. Some of the pieces that was in that first book actually made it in Black Girl, Call Home. And that's why the book is so big because I was allowed to take a wealth of the writing that I've been creating that has been sitting in my portfolio that didn't exist in the bigger world and put it into this book. And so you have Michelle Obama in this book, a piece that I wrote in college. You have a couple more pieces that I wrote years ago.

And so the process was looking into my portfolio and seeing what I had and what represented me and what I knew was important. I knew Michelle Obama was important. I knew certain poems about my home and my mother and myself were important. And then I thought about where the holes were. What are you missing? What do you need to write about but you're scared to write about? What did you not give yourself permission to write about?

And then there were obsessions. There are five poems in the book just about Whitney Houston because that's how much I thought about Whitney Houston in regards to her body, her addiction, her being from Newark. And then there are poems that I wrote about my grandmother and her house. And it was this obsession with my grandmother because at the time I was writing my book, my grandmother was going through chemo. She was also losing her house. And so the only thing I could think about was my grandmother's house all the time.

So you're gathering from the body and the spirit. And so you're thinking about the people you love, you're thinking about the things that you have to get out, you're thinking about the things that you're so desperately holding in, and then you're like, "All right. Well, how do I tailor this mess to something that people will see themselves in?"

Charlie Melcher:

I should tell you that the way I decided to consume your book was to do it as an audio book, because I so love your reading voice, or your performing voice. So I wanted to hear you share the book with me. I also just wanted to say, as a design object, you did just a spectacular job with that cover. It is out of this world great cover. It should win, honestly, book design awards for the cover. So congratulations on that. It's extraordinary.

Jasmine Mans:

The original artwork is from Micaiah Carter and he's a very young black photographer. And I saw this years ago, this photograph online and I saved it. I saw it on the internet. I saved it. And I was like, "This is gorgeous. This is beautiful. This is one of the most beautiful pictures I've ever seen.

Charlie Melcher:

Would you just describe that cover so people who haven't seen it yet will be able to imagine it?

Jasmine Mans:

Yeah, it's legitimately the definition of black girl nostalgia. And it's the back of a woman's head, Adaline. And she's actually a singer and incredible artists. And she took this in New York City, I believe at Afropunk, maybe years ago. But she standing face forward and you can only see the back of her head and her neck and she has barrettes in her hair. And the barrettes give you this 1990s kind of essence. And her hair is corn rolled in the barrettes are down in rows in her head. The back of a black woman's head specifically made me think, one, she's going somewhere. And two, when you see braids in a woman's head, you think about a map of someone, or that's what I thought of.

And it was a scary experience for me because this is my first time with a top five publisher. I'm going back and forth saying like, "No, but I think you all should pick this cover. No, pick that cover. No." And at some point they all looked at me and said, "We've given you 60 something covers. We got to pick one right now." And I'm like, "But I think it's the cover over there that I showed you." And I was so adamant about this cover and it was one thing that I wouldn't compromise on. And I was so scared because at the end of the day, you're like, "What if I'm the wrong one? They've published hundreds of books. I have not published any really. What if I'm wrong about this cover?"

And I wasn't wrong. And you know what it feels like to have that moment in your career for the first time, as a new professional to say, "This was a big deal and I was not wrong"? That was the moment that I became an adult. That's the moment where I realized that I could fight for my own ideas.

Charlie Melcher:

They might have known publishing, but they didn't know you and your work. You know you and that cover represents that work beautifully. I wonder, would you be willing to read something from the book for us?

Jasmine Mans:

This one is something that I like in regards to here:

I ain't going to be baldheaded no more. I wore these braids for two whole months and tonight mama going to wash my hair when she gets off work at 7:00 PM. It's longer than it was before. And when I wear it out at school, the rest of the girls won't call me baldhead no more. I'm going to be pretty as soon as mommy gets home from work.

Here's another one. That was her way of showing God.

We didn't go to church on Sundays, but my mother cleaned the whole house, wiped from behind the toilet to inside of the oven. That was her way of honoring God, separating cloth by color, making sure nothing bled onto anything else, stretching pork across seven days because even poverty knows ritual. Baptizing black babies in bathtubs of hand-me-down water, one after another, a poor woman's tradition, but of its own abundance. That was her way of showing God that she had a servant's heart, that she was a good woman with all the little she had.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that one. I love both of those actually. I'm feeling very happy that that's what you chose. So do you think of yourself as a poet, as a storyteller and what's the difference?

Jasmine Mans:

I think, and truly, I don't know, I'm speaking out loud. I was going to say I know that every poet is a storyteller, but maybe not every storyteller considers themselves a poet, but I've always thought that I was a storyteller and it wasn't until college and until I started navigating around the FoST community that I saw how layered storytelling could actually be and how many mediums storytelling could actually take place in, and what storytelling could do when it crosses medium and becoming intentional. And that goes back to how YouTube and media plays a role and art. And so I've not only throughout the years wanted to be a storyteller, but wanted to be an intentional storyteller who used a medium to be intentional about my storytelling, I know that I can narrate my own truth, but then there's this deeper essence of like, what kind of clay are we using here? Who are we talking to?

And then I started printing words on vinyl and putting them on walls. And it's like, now there's a quote of mine six feet somewhere. And I'm watching people stop by, but there were days where I sit and I'm just like, "Can you put the word martyr on a wall? Is martyr the kind of word that somebody would read in passing?" And so I realized that there were words that you would put on a building versus the words that you'd put on your Instagram versus the form of words that you put on YouTube. And so it's been a pleasure and it's been this like exciting scientific thing, almost exploring story and the emotions of story and then medium and form.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, it's amazing how you're working in so many media now. You're like the multimedia poet. I know you've also done things on t-shirts and other forms as well as walls. And it's exciting to see the creativity of communicating and learning how to do that in different media, different forms. What do you consider your role as a poet? Is there some responsibility that you feel as a black, queer, female poet to be out there telling stories or having a particular role in a responsibility with your art?

Jasmine Mans:

I was recently asking myself what is my personal thesis as a writer. And I think it's dissecting and analyzing black girlhood. What age does the black girl lose girlhood? And then you have to dissect that in different facets of like, and in the medical industry, when we believe that black women and black children can take pain, and so we treat them a specific kind of way, or don't treat them at all, or don't treat them like anything or when a police officer can throw a girl's body down to the ground in a way that the police officer wouldn't throw a white girl's body down to the ground. So there's this dynamic understanding with how we see brown girls' bodies versus how we see white girl bodies, where something as simple as me walking down the street and a really old man is trying to flirt with me.

And I say, "I'm old enough to be your granddaughter." And he says, "You're still older than 18." And at that moment, I lose the youthfulness. I was even reading an article just recently about black children, black girls, who are overweight, who are treated older because they are overweight, not because they're actually older. And so weight dynamics and media, so many dynamics pull at the girl hood and strip out the girlhood. And I want to explore that or even the concept of like, you're strong. The concept of strong also strips away at girlhood. The black girl body is becoming very, very important to me and something that sits on my mind daily, that I want to explore politically and creatively.

Charlie Melcher:

And, and through your poetry, I mean you're after something, this is not a narrative in the sense of just know traditional description or journalism or anything like that. You're going after helping communicate an experience, a sense of feelings, a way that somebody could feel something that you had felt. So there's a real creation of empathy from reading your work. I mean, I'm an old white guy. But I can read your poems and I can feel something or an estimation of something that you felt. I wonder if you're thinking about your audience and you're thinking about the role that the poetry can play in terms of building bridges and creating empathy for people who have different experiences.

Jasmine Mans:

Yeah. When you think about the story, and being the storyteller, it becomes the angle of what you tell the story. And I learned at a very young age as a poet to not be the professor. And what I mean by that is that we want to profess things as poets. And in the poem, I remember as a youngster, I wanted to have the question and the answer in the same breath. And I wanted to profess what was wrong with the entire world and that I had the answer, or maybe just profess what was wrong and then in the poem.

But that was neither here. It was the story. And it wasn't about how gentrification is wrong and how these Jewish white men walked down my grandmother's street and buy the houses for cash and how I hate gentrification. I don't think I actually said gentrification in the book. It was about Nana's house is getting old and she's about to sell it and it don't look the same. And the neighbors ain't the same and dah, dah, dah, and you see Nana's house and you see how old it's getting and you see how people have changed and you see time. And that allows you to feel like this neighborhood is shifting. I hope that it allows the reader to see at that moment where their neighborhood should be, and then you'll be like, that hurts that Nana wants to sell her house. It hurts that she's going to leave the house that she, and now you're emotionally connected because everybody has a Nana. And you know what it would feel like if your Nana just left the house that she was married in, that she had all her babies in. You have that emotional connection. And then the second layer is yeah gentrification. And so it's like, but you're already connected to the story and before we are theory and vocabulary, we're story.

Charlie Melcher:

It feels to me that your work does really honor your family, your home, your sense of place, your origin. I feel that through your poems, through your stories, very clearly. We had on the FoST podcast a guy named Brian McDonald, who is a real expert in stories. And he has this theory that all stories have some survival information in them that that's why stories have become this way that we as human beings communicate because we're trained to listen to stories because they helped us avoid the cave with the lion in it. Some of it was physical survival, some of it's emotional or social but do you feel that your poetry has some origin in survival?

Jasmine Mans:

Yeah. I appreciate art, that makes me feel like I can survive. I don't want a hundred percent know if I make people feel that way all the time. I think that I make people who feel like they can survive hard things, but I think that would hose the least amount of survival is the love poems that I have in my book. I feel like that holds the least hope. Whereas there is some weighty things that have survival connected to them. Yeah, I'll say that.

Charlie Melcher:

And again, survival doesn't have to mean physical survival or even spiritually, it can mean, I mean, in Brian's description it's also the desire to be able to have your genes propagate, so stories can be about love and romance and all of that because it's about passing on your lineage, if you will.

Jasmine Mans:

I had a moment where this woman posted my book next to her newborn baby and she said, "I took this book to the hospital for delivery, and I was going to read your books until I delivered." And you know the book that you take with you to keep you warm, to keep you comforted, to you that like, I'm going to be all right. That book that keeps you... My book kept this woman safe as she was preparing to bring a child into the world. I'm overwhelmed. And I know that it's a journey, just like you pick up Toni Morrison in college, and then you pick her up again at like 28 and then you pick her up at 32 and it's going to be a long-term relationship. And they're going to remove my face and it's like not a relationship with Jasmine, but a relationship with page seven and a relationship with page 13. And I think about the nights where I set up in bed and read poems to people I love, and people are going to read poems to people that they love. And I'm happy that it belongs to somebody.

Charlie Melcher:

This was great. I can't think of a better and more beautiful place to end. And I'm just so excited for you to have your voice out there and have it become, as you said, so important to other people and be shared and heard. And everyone has to go buy this book and read it.

Jasmine Mans:

I got one more thing. The book is called Black Girl, Call Home. there were no chapters in the book, but like the book started off with a telephone number. My agents see the number and they're like, well, what do you do with the number? And I'm just like, you call the number. And so they're calling number and I'm like, hold on it doesn't work but what if it did.

When I went to publish the book, Berkley and Random House, not only allow me to put the number in the book but the number works. And so every time someone calls the number, I get this email that someone interacted with the book. But I think that's also something that I learned from dwelling in your community, right? Where it was just like, it could be a flat book and it could be poems and stories can be flat, or it can be interactive, it can live, it can have breath. And so I've watched so many people reach the end of the book, see this number and call this number. And then on my phone, I get these emails. And when they call the number, they get a voice message and they hear another poem so they hear my voice. But then I get their numbers. And so there's going to be a day where I just call all of these numbers back. And I say like, thank you. I know that you got to the end of the book and no one has a telephone number in their book that you can call, other than phone books. I'm proud of myself.

Charlie Melcher:

I love it. I love it. I'm calling home.

Jasmine Mans:

Yes. Yes.

Charlie Melcher:

Big thank you to Jasmine Mans for joining me on the podcast today, I highly recommend you grab a copy of her new book, Black Girl, Call Home, which is available in print, digital and audio formats wherever you buy your books. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please subscribe to our podcast and be sure to share it with a friend. You can explore more of Jasmine's work and find a full transcript of this conversation by visiting the link in this episode's description. To join our community and stay up to date on the cutting edge of storytelling. Please subscribe to our newsletter, FoST in Thought at fost.org/sign up. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our friends at Charts and Leisure. I hope you'll join us again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then please be safe, stay strong and story on.