A few months ago I did an interview with NationTV 22 in Bangkok for the show Mong Rao Mong Lok / มองเรามองโลก.
zooming
me & Veenarat Laohapakakul, who asks wonderful questions
Here’s the full show that aired this weekend in Thailand –– it’s in Thai, but the interview is in English with subtitles! Hope you enjoy:
Last week I had the pleasure of Skyping in to Exeter, New Hampshire for two back-to-back sessions at Phillips Exeter Academy‘s Climate Action Day. This is the second year that PEA has held the event. Last year’s main speaker was Bill McKibben.
Phillips Exeter Academy (via Facebook)
On Climate Action Day, Exeter takes a break from the normal class schedule to hold a series of workshops on environmental and sustainability issues. This year, workshops included an audit of trash and recycling, tours of the Academy woods and power plant, work building a rain garden, an in-depth look at the Flint, MI water crisis, and a talk by yours truly over Skype.
Exeter generously offered to fly me in from New Zealand to give the talk in person, but I’m doing by best to reduce my environmental footprint. Avoiding flying is one huge way I can cut down on that. (You can calculate your own environmental footprint here.)
My Climate Action Day event description
I structured the talk in three parts. For the first 45 minutes, I told my story: how I went from Exeter to Harvard to cycling around the world. I talked in depth about my trip down the Mississippi River Trail in August 2013, my love for Anna Deavere Smith’s work, and what it’s like to hitch rides on boats in the South Pacific.
So far I have traveled and collected stories about water and climate change in the USA, Fiji, Tuvalu, New Zealand, and Australia. In mid-May 2016, I will arrive in Bangkok and start cycling and collecting stories in Southeast Asia.
August 2013, the end of my first solo bike trip down the Mississippi River Trail — the time I fell in love with collecting stories on two wheels
Harvard Graduation, May 2014: poet takes on the world
July 2015: in which I cycle up the east coast of Australia
October 2015: adventures in cargo ship travel across the Tasman Sea
After telling my story, I asked the audience to divide into pairs and match with someone they have never had a conversation with before.
The prompt: ask that person to tell you a story about water, a story about climate change, or whatever else might be on their mind. I asked the students to focus on eye contact, rhythm, and depth of focus (all topics touched on in the My Story part of the talk).
After a short time, the roles switched and the storyteller would become the storylistener.
I asked the students to thank their partners for sharing their story, because gratitude is important. Every story is a gift.
Then, I asked the pairs to brainstorm an answer to the question: How can I re-tell the story that I just heard in the most powerful and respectful way?
I wish I could have been there in person to walk around the space and listen. From my corner of the planet, it sounded like many wonderful conversations were happening at once.
We ended with 15 minutes of Q&A.
The students’ questions floored me:
“What do you plan to do with all of your stories?” “Where do you see yourself after the end of this journey?” “How do you cope with other peoples’ fears?”
All beautiful questions––thoughtful ones.
“What is a story?” one student asked. “How would you define story?”
Here is my best answer:
Storytelling is a way of communicating individual or group identity in real time. Stories are sticky, in that they are easy to transfer between people, and a well-communicated story has the power to stay around long after the original storytelling event.
Not all stories are told. Some are danced, some are written, and others are transformed into various works of art. I like that the definition above is broad enough to encompass many different forms of storytelling.
That said, it is by no means the only answer to the question. Stories have as many forms as the people who tell them. The most beautiful questions have many answers, I think.
It was an absolute joy to give a talk at Exeter, and I hope that I can return to campus to say hello in person once I am back in North America.
Do you like the sound of the above & want to have me to speak at your campus / company / event?
I am available to give similar talks anywhere in the world via Skype, so long as I have an internet connection. You can learn more here: devi-lockwood.com/speaking-engagements
Arohanui = big love,
Devi
Fine people of the internet:
Holy goodness, it’s been a while. I have so much to tell you! This is going to be a long post, so fasten your seat belts, friends. Pour a cup of tea. The last month has been full of life.
Autumn always makes me think of new beginnings: the start of school, most intimately (I’m two years out of university, but the feeling still lingers)––classes and lectures and rowing practice and long shadows in the afternoons. It’s a time to go internal, to breathe deeply in that slippery light.
Kapiti Coast
Everything starts in blue, right?
In mid-March I ventured north from the Kapiti Coast to volunteer for three days at WOMAD New Zealand, a world music festival that takes over New Plymouth once a year. The acts were something out of this world. Tami Neilson’s Album “Don’t Be Afraid” has been on heavy rotation in my world for the last six months or so; it was divine to see her perform live. You best believe I danced my socks off.
Seriously, go listen to her stuff right now.
And then there was DakhaBrakha, a Ukrainian quartet who wear funky hats and dedicate themselves to preserving Ukrainian folk songs. Their creative process is something like this: 1) go to the remote mountain areas in Ukraine, 2) find the oldest living women in the mountain villages, 3) ask them to sing the folk songs they know, 4) record said songs, and 5) reimagine the songs for today’s audience.
The result is AMAZING. Talk about kick-ass percussion. And of course my inner folklorist is dancing.
From Taranaki I traveled north to Auckland for a wedding. Because sometimes surprise things happen on the road.
Speaking of which, I’d love to introduce you all to my travel buddy from here on out… Charlotte Chadwick!
We clean up okay. This was at Charlotte’s high school bff’s wedding in Auckland.
Charlotte is a singer-songwriter, poet, and theater-person extraordinaire (actor / director / playwright / etc.) from Aotearoa New Zealand who also happens to be an awesome ESL teacher. She’s traveled all over and tells great stories, to boot. You can listen to some of Charlotte’s music here: charlottechadwick.bandcamp.com
The journey will be solo at times, together at times, and delightfully messy, as per always. Because that is what journeys are. Journeys change. And this change is most definitely good.
Happy Devi is happy 🙂
From Auckland, Charlotte and I headed to Tauranga to learn some coding skills from the delightfully talented Robert O’Brien, a software developer who has generously given his time to make the next phase of the One Bike One Year journey a reality. His son, Max, has also kindly volunteered his design talents.
Octocat, a new friend
Ya’ll know how I have been alluding to making a map on a website where you can click on a point and listen to a story from that place?
Well, it’s coming to fruition. Slowly, but yes. Things are happening. Stay tuned.
Doing metadata research at the National Library audio archives in Wellington & geeking out over all the old audio equipment
Then Charlotte & I started to plot a way out of Aotearoa. This wasn’t easy, because I had made a commitment not to fly.
Friends, we tried everything.
I went back and forth for four months with a cargo ship executive who had promised me a free trip out of New Zealand. Long story short, he couldn’t make it happen. There were insurance problems. Oy.
Then we tried for super yacht / sailing positions. But it’s the wrong season to sail towards Southeast Asia. The cruise ship companies we talked to didn’t have positions that would suit our needs, but we applied anyway and heard nothing.
Then, grudgingly, we looked at flights. There was a ridiculous sale going from Wellington to Bangkok in mid-May.
We bought the tickets.
I’ll be writing more about this soon, but weighing the value of travel and continuing to collect stories vs. the carbon footprint of a flight (or even a cargo ship trip, for that matter)… it’s sticky stuff. And stuff that it’s necessary to talk more about.
Honestly, poetry helps get me through.
And while I do have a small place in the “family of things”, it’s my duty as an activist to tread lightly on this planet while doing the kind of listening work that has become my life.
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”
So many questions. Mary Oliver is a goddess of questions.
In other news:
The cardboard sign turned three years old! HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the wrinkly piece of cardboard that has helped me collect hundreds of stories in five countries during the last 3 years. There will be a new incarnation of the cardboard sign in SE Asia, most likely with words in more than one language. Woot!
Baby cardboard sign / day one of story collecting / Boston / April 2013
Speaking of multi-lingualism, my work was featured in a newspaper in Vietnam:
And last week was pretty big: I did an interview with the German enorm Magazin for their June issue, plus an interview & photo shoot with Bicycling Magazine in the good ol’ US of A. Not sure when that print copy will be out, but I’ll post some sneak peak photos as soon as I have them to share.
It was a windy afternoon on top of the world where Jacob Howard took the photos for Bicycling––you check out some of his other work here. The big uphill climb up beyond the Brooklyn Turbine was totally worth it.
Big wind, big sky, bigger things ahead.
Onwards,
Devi
These two questions come from my lovely kickstarter backers. Thanks again for your support! It means the world.
What’s the inner monologue like inside your head when you stumble upon an amazing moment or find yourself in an extremely tough situation?
I think to myself: When can I slip away to write about this amazing / tough moment?
No, but really. I keep a notebook and a pen on my person at all times to record moments like these.
Sometimes my mind is so full before bed that I have to stay up for an hour getting it all down before I can even conceive of sleeping.
I have been wrestling for months with some scenes that I’m just not ready to write. Heck, it might be years before I’m ready to fully process them. I’m learning to be patient with myself. Slowness is important. Fermentation. Something like that.
I’m a compulsive communicator. It’s sometimes a blessing and sometimes a proper pain in the butt.
If my mind is buzzing to the point that it’s too much to manage, I have non-writing coping mechanisms. Long bike rides (conveniently) are one of them. Running is another. If all else fails, I put on Prince and have a good dance party with myself.
On the bright side, my need to record things lets awful situations become just that bit more tolerable, because hey, I can write about this. Everything becomes fuel for the fire when you look at it in the right light.
What is the most afraid you have felt while on this journey and how did you get through it?
Back in early April I woke up in my tent next to a canal, made oatmeal for breakfast, and set about on a quest to find drinking water. I was completely out of water, which can feel a bit frightening when you’re cycling for hours on end. A few kilometers down the road, fortunately, I found a salmon farm. I propped my bicycle on its side and walked up to the little building where the employees were enjoying their midmorning tea break.
I asked one of the workers if I could fill up my water bottles. He directed me to a faucet. More employees came in for tea. I went back out to put the bottles on my bike and took out my “tell me a story about water” sign, which seemed like a good idea, given the context. Water! Salmon! It’s all linked, right?
Nets keep the fish in captive in the canal water. Every so often one jumped.
I struck up a conversation with two of the workers who are from Chile. They told me a story about agriculture and the dairy farmers sucking the river dry, how the wealth was benefitting a select few but not the many. The woman offered me a cup of tea and one of the pieces of toast she was buttering. “Do you have hunger?” she asked, the direct translation of the verb from Spanish. Languages make me so happy.
Then a man with bulging, bloodshot eyes, a legitimate rattail down his back, and a cigarette between his lips came over started yelling at the couple. “You can’t offer guests company tea,” he spat, “and you buffoons were ten minutes late to work this morning.” Then he went off on this whole tirade about people-hours and The Company and how they would have to take that time out of their timesheets when they clock out and work an extra fifteen minutes. He was yelling. No one intervened. All of the workers in their hi-vis orange vests looked down at their phones or into their teacups. “And you two just come dawdling in here for a smoker and you think you can take a break?! I’ll tell you what. Some clown is going to go for a fucking swim.”
I could see this supervisor man’s injured masculinity out for a walk on the tables and chairs. Does he really have such a small amount of self-worth that he feels the need to take out his personal problems on others? It was frightening.
My strategy: get away and stay away from said negativity, ASAP. Fortunately it was relatively simple for me to apologize to my friends for getting them into trouble and just cycle away and get on with my life.
What a toxic environment to work in. I have so much respect for the workers, and I hope they know that they shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of shit. That supervisor is a proper asshole.
I cycled away as my Chilean friends were sprinkling feed. The salmon jumped high above their nets.
Eden Brent sidles up next to me at my plastic chair in Doe’s Eat Place. Her boogaloo voice makes even the red and white squares on the checkered tablecloth come alive with music.
“I bet you wanted to sit next to a good lookin’ guy!” she chortles, loud and confident. “Well, I’ll tell you what: you got a good lookin’ girl instead.” Eden tilts her head back when she laughs and fills the whole room. Other diners pause with their forks halfway to their mouths or a knife in the air and stare. We don’t care. Our table is the length of the entire room and we are squished knee to knee to have a good time, to reconnect.
I met the loud, musical Brent family by accident, or trail magic, or just dumb luck. Everything is connected. In August 2013 I rode my bicycle down the Mississippi River Trail to collect stories from people I met along the way. I made a brief detour to Clarksdale, Mississippi at the suggestion of a librarian I met on the plane to Memphis.
“You won’t regret going to Clarksdale, honey,” she told me over the roar of takeoff, offering me a piece of minty gum. “It’s a must-go place. And plus, there’s a blues festival this weekend.” Sure enough there was music. And water. Lord, do I love water.
I ended up dehydrated in a farmer’s supply shop in Clarksdale after an unsuccessful attempt at finding my new friend Marc Taylor’s place on Old Highway 61. The two brothers who owned the place thought the sight of me with a loaded bicycle was a hoot.
“You’re all alone? And what does your mama think?”
The brothers handed me three bottles of icy water and we got to talking while sitting on lawn chairs inside the shop. Between sips of cool water––there’s nothing sweeter on a dry throat––I asked: “How does a combine work?”
It’s the questions that get me places.
As it turns out, one of the brothers lectures on agriculture at Delta State. My combine question sparked a two-hour detour in his white truck during which I learned about the difference between soybeans and milo and peanuts and the sticky, hexagonal bloom of a cotton flower. Seemingly anything could grow under the fertile umbrella of a delta sky––market prices drive which crops are planted, though. At the end of our trip the sun was arcing low and the brothers graciously dropped me off at my friend’s bright blue shack.
“Go see John Ruskey,” the youngest added, munching a toothpick between his teeth. “You’ll love Quapaw.”
“That place on Sunflower?” I asked, remembering a colorful, hand-painted sign I had passed earlier in the day. It looked closed.
“Just walk down by the river. You’ll find them there.”
Sure enough I did. John Ruskey a.k.a. Driftwood welcomed me into his basement-level office at the Quapaw Canoe Co. filled with life jackets and river maps and fossilized coral. His daughter, Emma, flitted about while strumming a mini guitar.
“I found a fish!” she exclaimed, running off to fetch its small body that she has preserved in salt. “It’s a bit stinky, but not too bad. Stinky, stinky, stinky!”
Driftwood rolled out a brightly colored map he had drawn of the Mississippi. The lines of the river have a dance of their own, arching smooth. The system is fed by fingers that reach into the east and west.
“You can stay upstairs at the International Youth Hostel if you’d like,” Driftwood said when it was time to go to the festival.
“How much does it cost?”
“Oh, you can stay for free.”
The Youth Hostel is a converted bar. Shellacked turtle shells and petrified mud and driftwood chandeliers beautify the space. There’s a perma-layer of rivermud on the floor that only adds to the hostel’s charm. I ducked in to drop off my panniers next to my bed for the night: a platform with a mattress on top that is suspended by fist-thick rope from a metal bar on the ceiling. It is fondly referred to as “The Floating Bed.”
While unpacking my sleeping bag I met the brilliant Chris Staudinger. Chris, a New Orleans native, was working at Quapaw for a jaunt after graduating from Boston College. We connected instantly.
“There are no straight lines in riverspeak,” Chris told me over a cup of sun tea spiked with lemon.
We went out dancing and bonded over the bliss that is pecan beer while questioning the gendered expectations of asking someone to dance. Meeting Chris set off a chain reaction of southern hospitality that followed me all the way down the river.
“Where do you go next?” he asked.
“Rosedale.” And so Chris texted his buddy David in Oxford whose parents, Becky and Bill, are from Rosedale. Can you take on a girl biking the river trail by herself? They said yes.
After a four-hour ride in the August sun, I was grateful for a big mattress to sprawl out on. Becky and Bill fed me toast and scrambled eggs spiced with homegrown jalapeños. I counted my lucky stars.
The next day was Sunday. Becky and Bill asked if I wanted to go to church and I said yes. Why not?
Before paying homage to God we paid homage to the river with an early-morning jaunt on a motorboat. Later that evening Bill showed me his Cabinet of Curiosities full of mastodon teeth and river glass and vertebrae, along with a bowling pin and unidentified metal bits he has collected from the river’s churning stomach.
Back on land, the pastor began her sermon by asking: “Now who needs praying for today?”
One woman’s mother was suffering from a malignant form of brain cancer. We sent prayers her way. I pictured my silent words soaring up above the pulpit and out one of the stained glass windows, over the soybean fields to find this woman in her bedroom. Every little bit helps.
Becky stood up next to me in the pew. “I just wanna say that I have this here girl here staying the night with me and she is riding her bicycle down the Mississippi River all the way to Venice. Do any of ya’ll know someone in Greenville she can stay with so that she doesn’t have to sleep on the side of the road? Bless her heart.”
Anne Martin popped up instantly. “I do! I do!” Anne waved both her hands as she spoke. I knew I had found a new friend. Anne worked for twenty years as an anchor at the local TV station in Greenville and knew most everyone in the town. Later on when we walked together in the Kroger grocery, people would stop her to ask if she was really the woman from TV. She always smiles and says politely, “Well yes I am. That was years ago, though.”
“We’ll have to introduce her to the Brents.”
Anne worked her magic and made a few phone calls. By sunrise I had a set of directions in my hand and instructions to call Jessica Brent once I passed the Winterville Mounds going south on the Mississippi Number One. “You can’t miss the mounds. It’s the only hill aside from the levee for miles.”
Jessica met me just outside the criss-crossed gate that marks her yard. When I pulled off the highway and into her driveway, Jessica took one look at me and said: “Girl, where are your lights?! Don’t you know people ‘round here drive drunk?” The next day she came back from Walmart with an orange reflective vest, a pair of red and white flashing lights, and reflective stickers, which we stapled all over the vest. I’m sure these safety measures saved my life. Farther down the road, I met truckers who had passed me miles before on their way to the grain elevators: “You were blinkin’, honey. Blinkin’ and blinkin’ and I could see you comin’ from far away.”
Jessica and I stayed in touch. I wrote her a postcard and she came to visit Boston in mid-October. We took the elevators to the observatory deck at the roof of the Science Center where you can see the brick of Harvard Square laid out like legos. A thick layer of fog obscured the Boston skyline, but I gestured to where it would be, the contours of the Charles River hidden beyond tall buildings.
One year later: we’re all around a table again, laughing like no time has passed. Doe’s has no menu. Jessica reaches across the table to explain. “You want a salad? You have to try the salad.”
Her father Howard jumps in with his hand on my shoulder, “Baby, you like shrimp, right? Now you want it broiled or fried?” Howard squeezes “baby” into every sentence like it is liquid gold, instant belonging.
I wish I could have met his wife, Carol. She brought music to the family, and it reverberates still.
Jessica orders two-dozen hot tamales and three T-bone steaks for the table for good measure.
The food comes and it smells beautiful. All of it. Even the French fries.
I tend to lose consciousness of my body when I’m engaged full-on in the act of listening, but at the sight and smell of the large platters, the hunger that had laid dormant in my stomach stands up to dance. The dipping sauce for the shrimp is garlicky and divine. I didn’t know I liked shrimp until I rode down to the Gulf and said yes to a fresh catch. Everything changes in proximity to the sea.
“Here honey, this is chocolate––” Eden says, feeding me a bite-sized piece of steak she has carefully selected. “––chocolate from a cow’s ass!”
The meat melts into my body. I can’t remember the last time I ate red meat. Good god.
Bronwynne, the third Brent sister, is seated at the far side of table outside of talking distance––there are boyfriends and family friends scattered in between us. I make sure to tell her that I love her music before I leave, how it sustained me through many a long afternoon of senior thesis writing last summer.
On my last night in Greenville last summer, the Brents called a party together at Hank Burdine’s place. We cooked red beans and rice and after the meal, the guitar came out, passed from hand to hand.
“I just think we needed a reason to celebrate,” Jessica told me in between glasses of wine. “And here you are.”
I am an auditory person. When I meet someone, the first thing I notice is the musicality of their voice––how they let the taste of a word linger on their tongue or send sentences flying into the ether. Breath. Intonation. Word choice. Sometimes my favorite thing to do is close my eyes and listen.
In my sophomore year at Harvard I took a kick-ass course with Prof. Robin Bernstein called “Race, Gender, and Performance.” This course introduced me to the work of Anna Deavere Smith, an actress, playwright, and professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts whose art inspires my own. Back in the 1980s, Deavere Smith began interviewing and recording stories from people across the United States. Then, using the exact wording of the recordings, she translated those interviews into performance pieces. In her TED Talk, Deavere Smith outlines her creative processes and performs excerpts from her solo show “On the Road: A Search for American Character.”
So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder — thank God for technology — to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words — which is also why I don’t wear shoes when I perform — if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him.
Everything I do is word for word off a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems.
— Anna Deavere Smith (full transcript here)
“If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” We are, in other words, made of the words we give breath to––the very sentences we speak into existence. The interplay between language and identity is at the core of the questions I want to ask of poetry. How do poetry and storytelling intersect?
I started to explore this question in my senior thesis, a book-length work of poems entitled There Are No Straight Lines. In August 2013 I biked 800 miles from Memphis, Tennessee to Venice, Louisiana following the Mississippi River Trail. Along the way I collected fifty hours of stories from the people I met who call the Mississippi riverbanks their home. At times, a single word or phrase sparked a poem. In other cases, I deferred to lengthy transcriptions to capture the rhythm of a storyteller’s speech. I love working with the raw material of others’ words––it has proved to be a river of inspiration. In the words of Anna Deavere Smith, “people speak in organic poems.” Where there are people telling stories, there is organic poetry.
(Poetry lives elsewhere, too, but it is the people side of poems that I am most interested in.)
But my time spent playing with these questions is far from done. By listening carefully and making audio recordings of the voices I hear about water-based climate change on this year-long trip, I hope that I can, as Deavere Smith does, “walk in their words”––let the voices I hear guide my writing.
So, readers: I’m curious. What questions are motivating your own work and play? What questions do you want to ask of the world? How do these questions resurface in your own stories? Do you have any favorite poems that tell a story?
I want to leave you with this wonderful comic on questions, A DAY AT THE PARK, by Kostas Kiriakakis. The whole thing is worth a read.
“I would never trade a question for an answer.” –– Kostas Kiriakakis
One Bike, One Year 