Abena Ntoso: Welcome to backlit a space for groundbreaking conversations with emerging authors. I'm your host, Abena Ntoso. In each episode I converse with a contemporary writer and thinker whose work inspires deep and authentic conversation around social issues. Our discussion is not just about the book, or even about the writer's life and work. Our discussion is a shared space where minds meet to be inspired by one another, explore issues together and ultimately to generate new ideas and perspectives. 

Today's thought partner is Laura-Gray Street, ecopoet and author of the recently released poetry collection, Just Labor. Her previous poetry collections include Pigment and Fume, poems that explore, scavenge, celebrate, and interrogate the natural world and the nature of our relationships. She has co-edited 3 ecopoetry anthologies, including the most recent anthology Attached to the Living World released in March of this year, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, a hybrid literary and natural history anthology. In 2018 her collaboration with UK visual artist Anne Marie Creamer was on display in galleries in Sheffield, England, and Yantai, China. She is Professor of English at Randolph College, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Laura-Gray, thank you so much for spending this time, and having this conversation with me.

Laura-Gray Street: Thank you, Abena. It's wonderful to be here and talk to you.

Abena Ntoso: Well, so I want to just start off by introducing your book, Just Labor, which came out in March of this year just a couple of months ago, and when I first saw the release of it I was just floored. I loved the ideas that you bring together in the book.  Just Labor opens with the poem “World Organization of Textiles, or Servo-Mechanical Utopia,” which frames the collection's exploration of relationships between women and industrialization. The combination of these two ideas is what drew me to your book in the first place, and I'm excited for our discussion because these poems, in finding language and words to express new perspectives that emerge from examining women and industrialization simultaneously these poems create a space for generating new ideas and new possibilities for our own lives. So I'd love to have you read the opening poem, and perhaps we can use it as a touch point throughout our discussion.

Laura-Gray Street: Great, great. 

World Organization of Textiles or Servo-Mechanical Utopia 

Fully automated, the factory becomes a source
of contemplation. Observe how the ceilings are
limitless and machines stretch for miles—
this one blowing up cotton bits to start them
frolicking like dandelion fluff or the effervescent
plastic balls once used for bingo and lotteries,
another skimming eggshell thin layers from vast
open ranges of bales to blend them. How tenderly
the motorized forklifts scoop and cradle infant
fibre, trundle it to the mothering machines
humming as they spin. Radiant conveyor belts
merry-go-round freshly finished cloth
to schoolyards for packaging and shipping.
Forty times an hour, the air is rinsed of residual
contaminants—sweat, sickness, human history—
and flushed as purified liquid over canyons
of wall fountains that pour into distant oceans
of reflecting pools that reflect only the smoothest
weave of featureless beauty, still, undisturbed.
Think of the endless ways we are relieved.

Abena Ntoso: Thank you so much for that beautiful reading, and I love the way these lines evoke the language of mothering to describe motorized and mechanical actions by large industrial machines… and there's a juxtaposition, a paradox there, and it creates a tension that makes us look at mothers and machines in a different light and in many ways it draws a parallel between the two, which is, of course, disturbing yet undeniable, and it makes me think of the mechanistic expectations we place on women and mothers, and it calls this into question, and I know there are lots of times I've felt like women and mothers are expected to operate as machines and ceaselessly fulfill duties of caregiving and domesticity, all while keeping up with a career and social relationships, and it's just a lot, right, and there's this sense of you know, being a machine that that seems to be an expectation with motherhood or even you know women in general, whether you have children or not. And so the question I'd love to open up with is just what inspired you to explore the connections between women and mechanization, and what made you decide to explore this through poetry?

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah. This poem in particular was, I guess, sparked by that. I ran across an old article in a textile, you know, magazine or something that was about the world organization of textiles. And then it had this “servo-mechanical utopia.” So that was language that I grabbed from this text. And so it spun out from there. I'll confess I love science fiction. I read a ton of science fiction, speculative work, and so that notion of anthropomorphizing or bringing some kind of human life to these machines is something that fascinates me, and a lot of the things that I read and watch. So it really kind of did that, I think, before I was thinking more about the mothers and mechanization, although that certainly rings true in a lot of ways, and you know, as wonderful as motherhood is, it's also exhausting. But there are ways in which the machines here are in control of things that as a mother I don't know that I always have always felt so in control, you know that's an interesting tension as you bring that up. The complicated answer to your question, which will probably apply to a lot, is that I rarely have an idea that I want to write about. I kind of freaked a student out with this answer earlier this year because he was like, yeah, a writer is someone who always has ideas, and I'm like, not this writer. This writer doesn't start with ideas like, I want to write. I want to make a statement about this. I want to write about this. It's that the poem or the piece of writing happens, and then out of that grows something that I have an insight into… and so I think with this collection, because I was thinking about textiles because I was thinking about mothers and bodies, and all of that, the imagery just kind of wound itself up. But it's interesting, because to talk about it in retrospect is one thing, but to set out and write a poem, as I know you know it's very different than setting up, say, to write an essay where you have a thesis, and I told the student that the longer it takes me to figure out what my poems are about usually the better they are. If I think I know, “oh, yes, this is what is happening, this is what I'm trying to say in the poem,” if that happens early in the process the poem ends up, It's kind of, it's a thinner thing. So I guess I always hope that I'm going to write something that I'm finding my way in sort of in the half dark, and because of that, lots of things that are milling around are going to enter in by different doorways, cracks, crevices, and stuff, and it'll be a richer, a richer mix because of that. I hope that makes sense. 

Abena Ntoso: Absolutely.

Laura-Gray Street: I guess a writing process doesn't have to make sense right?

Abena Ntoso: Absolutely. You know I love that you are bringing up this idea of not knowing what the poem is about before you write it, and not going into it with you know, kind of a preconceived notion of what the theme is, and it makes me think a lot about the idea of writing as a form of discovery, and a form of discovering what you think, or discovering what's inside of you as opposed to, you know, saying, well, “I know what I want to say. I know what I want to explain,” or you know that approach is more of a you know, persuasive or informational approach, but but not one that that that necessarily lends itself to a piece that ends up feeling like there was a discovery through the piece, you know, and I also think a lot about how, when we approach writing as an act of discovery, as a practice of discovery, it it brings in more opportunities for the reader to experience that that piece as a journey, because they're discovering along with the author.

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah, yeah, Robert Frost is still with us. “No surprise for the poet, no surprise for the reader.”

Abena Ntoso: Yes, yes, absolutely. It makes me think also about, you know, the idea of work is really central to the book, and the idea of industrialization, and there's the mechanical aspect of it and the artificiality of that. It makes me think about the context in our world, now, with AI coming on the scene, and you know, there's been a lot of discussion about how that's going to impact writing and teaching writing. So I'm curious to know if this process of writing the book, and even what came out of writing a book that was centered around the idea of industrialization and work and women, if that opened up any thoughts or ideas or experiences in connection with AI, and how that may end up changing the landscape of work.

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah, yeah, “think of the many ways we are relieved.” I mean, you know, obviously, that “relieved” is working in different ways. Relief like, “Oh, a relief! This work is done for us,” which is part of AI. But also we're relieved of duty, you know. We're relieved. We don't have anything to do. I wrote that poem before AI was really a factor in our lives in the way it is now, the way it's in our faces everywhere.

So it's really interesting to go back into that poem and to kind of feel there was some prescience there. Not that that hasn't been a part of science fiction, and all of that, you know. There's no new idea there in any way. But that feeling of when I wrote that last line, and it was one of those ones that just kind of came. I was working on the other lines, and then it just came out, and it was like, “Oh, yeah, that's the last line. That's that. Yes, we're relieved. We have had this taken from us, but we're also, we're extraneous now, we're not needed anymore. So it's scary. It's scary. 

I was on the AI policy, the academic portion of the committee this year. We're working on trying to figure out our policy for the school, and you know that art and technology have connections, you know what whatever changes are going on in technology have an impact on the way art is produced. I mean, certainly the printing press, you know, there are all kinds of examples of this, and I generally have found that to be something interesting to think about and positive, and people are threatened by it in the time of that change, but in looking back, we can see interesting, you know, the development of optics, telescopes, microscopes, all of that, and you know the camera and how that shifted painting. And then abstraction became more of a thing because cameras could record the representative stuff, so painters ended up going off in these really interesting other directions. Not that representation went away.

So I had, or started with, a lot of those thoughts. I'm a little bit more worried about AI. Now, in the sense that it does relieve our thinking processes in a way that I think we need to be very, very careful with, and as I'm thinking about teaching and students and how to help them sort this out, you know. Originally, I was thinking, okay, this is like Wikipedia magnified right. When Wikipedia came out, we had to do a lot of talking and teaching about, okay, don't ever use it as a primary source. Right? That's not what you do, but go to it, get an overview and go and look at their sources and then follow those, and okay. So it's a tool of that kind of thing. So we've learned how to use Wikipedia in a way that's responsible, that is you know, produces higher levels of thought and teaching students how to do that. So I think there's that element going on with using generative AI.

But there is such a capacity to just be relieved of everything we have to do. The temptations there are pretty great. So I think it's going to take a bigger conversation, not to mention the environmental impact of, you know, the water usage all of that at a time when we really can't afford those kinds of impacts on our climate. So taking all of that very seriously, I think, will be important, and I think it's going to push some interesting things. I just saw an article that said, you know Blue Books are making a comeback. Writing by hand is making a comeback because we're asking students to do that. There are ways in which the handwork at many different levels is going to also be valued in different ways, and that's a good thing, I think.

Abena Ntoso: You've said so many things that I'd like to dig into a little bit more, and I I want to come back to the whole idea of the environmental issues in connection with industrialization and technological progress. But before that I want to stay on this topic of AI, and how it makes us think about the purpose of writing, and why we write, and you mentioned being on the committee and trying to address, as an institution, how you're going to approach AI and writing instruction, and it makes me think about what we gain from writing ourselves, from the practice of writing. One of the things that I know we've talked about is the idea of silences in our lives, and writing can present that opportunity to explore those silences or explore things that we may not understand about the world or about ourselves to kind of explore what we're thinking and what questions we have and what our next steps might be, and exploring how we can look at those areas where there are silences that are problematic and what we do about that. So I'm just really curious to know, for you, in this process of writing, just labor and writing the poems in this collection, what were some of the things that you discovered as you were working on the project, and as it started to come together through your process of doing the writing?

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah, silences are an interesting aspect of it. I did a lot of research for this book. So there was sort of generalized intention. Not not that I want to write a poem that says this, but just the general topic and subject matter. The book started because my mom grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was one of the capitals of the textile industry. At one point it was called Spindle city because it had so many spindles, you know, more than any other city at one point so I was doing a lot of research there. I was in a lot of sort of archival stuff. Chapel Hill has wonderful resources, and they've had these projects where they've interviewed and transcribed those interviews with former textile mill workers and things like that. And then it wasn't just North Carolina but, you know, lots of other places, England elsewhere, you know many things. I didn't want it to be absolutely localized, nor did I want it to be entirely a historical book, if that makes any sense. Thus the science fiction aspects of it that creep up in some different poems. But yeah, silences are interesting because I found so much interesting stuff about the workers, about that history, about the labor movements and that sort of thing, and what was fascinating to me, and disturbing was, even though you could find these kind of polished biographical accounts of the the mill owners and things like that, their own lives, their their words were not available, and that was a silence to me in a different way than I had thought about it before. I'd always thought of silence as a group, or historically silenced, or some, whereas this was a silence of privilege, of privacy. And so I realized that silence has actually got both sides to it, so that so much had been done to give the textile mill workers their voices was wonderful and still work to be done. But there was this other side to it that was kind of fascinating. So that was one of the discoveries. 

There were other things on a very different note. I realized at some point I was like, I didn't realize I was writing a menopause book. But yet I was, you know, because that became the threads of that through the book were, and that was not planned by any means, I mean, certainly the body and women and, but it is a bloody book. There's blood in the book, and it's mostly women's blood, you know it's and and then the lack of blood that was, you know, that whole process. So, being a woman having children, fertility, utility, being able to, you know, earn a living as a woman when you need to, as a textile mill worker, and then when that ends, it's an interesting yeah. So that was something that surprised me.

Abena Ntoso: My experience with reading it also felt like surprises that were wonderful, I mean, and I think it again goes back to the idea that you know if you are discovering as you're writing, and you are allowing yourself to be surprised and to go down paths and directions that you hadn't anticipated. It makes for incredibly intriguing work. That was also, you know, something that I knew about the book when I picked it up that you know it was exploring this intersection between women and industrialization. But the many ways that you did that was just phenomenal. And so the poems that explored the body and the processes of the body, especially those that are unique to women. Those were just fascinating and definitely relatable. 

So I love that idea of discovering things about history and the way we are looking at it, and what is said and what is available in the documentation versus what is not. And I think about this idea, you mentioned the silence of privilege. And it's one that, you're right, we don't talk about a lot. We talk about the silence of fear or the silence of shame, but there is a silence of privilege. I think it's one that's worth talking about. It's one that I think is worth exploring and wondering and trying to understand and hopefully, conversations like the one we're having are conversations that help us all to think about the ways in which you know, we might hold silences about things that we probably should be discussing or looking into more. 

It makes me think also of something else that you have done a lot of work with in your ecopoetry work you, I know, have done some work with environmental justice and you've mentioned Dr. Robert Bullard's work and just being a voice for environmental justice rights and environmental issues. So I'd love to hear more about your ecopoetry work and how some of your work around environmental issues intersected with these social issues and labor issues that you were exploring in just labor.

Laura-Gray Street: Hmm, yeah, thank you. To me there is no really good environmental work that doesn't take account of social justice at the same time. And that's what environmental justice is. It's the bringing together of those two things. So again, reading Robert Bullard many years ago, was eye-opening. I actually assigned, used one of his books in a first year writing class of first year comp. That was interesting because they humored me, but it's a little bit above that level of thinking and writing, but I figured, you know, I expose them to it, and that's good. 

So an organization that I have been a part of since 2001, I think the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment is, which is a great organization. Again, similar kind of, you know, over the time the kind of opening up and understanding of the complexity of environmental issues and the intersection of that and social issues and how important that is. 

In the original ecopoetry anthology we have a whole introduction where we define, you know, and sort of categorize ecopoetry, nature, poetry you know all this kinds of stuff, but, you know, in thinking about my own poems again, anytime I've set out to say, okay, I'm going to write an ecopoem, or I'm going to write a poem about … this ends up being a really horrible poem. So I just kind of trust that because this is the way that I look at the world, this is the way the poem is going to happen at some level. And so even in just labor, I mean, that was very much an element for me. It needs to have the social justice and the social history going on as well as the environment, the ecological, you know both. And I need both those things to be happening. Again, the kind of multilayered textures of those things. So even work that doesn't feel ecological to me that in my work to me is at a very basic level. 

Abena Ntoso: It was exciting to hear that you introduced students in your first year writing course to Robert Bullard's work, and it makes me think about, as a teacher, you know, the things that I try to bring into my teaching and the variety of works I try to expose students to, so that they can know what's out there. So it makes me wonder, you know, when you think about the work you do in teaching, and especially teaching a first year writing course, you know freshman writing course in college, which is a course that is required for all first year students, how do you imagine it will change or is changing? And how are you adapting now that we are exploring different opportunities that writing and work and AI and environmental issues present for us in what we do and how we do it?

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah that's an important question, and I am very fortunate, I teach at a small school and our writing classes are capped at 12. So that to me is the 1st step I can't imagine trying to teach writing to 35 students, for you know I don't. I couldn't teach writing. I know that some people can do that, but I couldn't. It doesn't work like that for me. I think writing is best taught as intimately as possible, as close to one on one. I have one on one conferences with my students in all my writing classes, creative writing, and, you know I try to do at least two per session, something, you know, one or two. I see their work in many, many, you know, through many drafts, and again, I think that is key. I mean, someone may start with something that is very AI generated, but by the time they finish it with me, it's going to be their work by default, because they can't, you know, they have to generate the revisions, and then they have to reflect on them. They have to talk about them, they have to be able to talk about the choices that they made. And so you know, my answer for the world problem of teaching writing in the world of AI would be, keep class sizes really small. Let teachers have the opportunity to interact with students regularly with their writing. And you know, multiple revision stages to get to know their writing, to get to care about. You know the students and help them write about things that they are passionate about, because I think they write better. 

A lot of my first year writing classes will typically have some kind of little environmental… We also, you know we each get to kind of design those courses around themes of our own choosing. There's a pretty large degree of freedom and autonomy at Randolph for teaching first year writing. We all teach grammar, punctuation, and writing stuff and all that, some environmental things. But I would usually try to ask my student, “What do you think you're going to major in, or what are your major interests?” and that sort of thing. And then I would then steer each of them, “Okay, if you're if you're headed towards, you know an economics business major, here are some ways of thinking about this environmentally framed question through that discipline,” you know, or psychology, or dance, or whatever and to show that that there's a way of of looking, you know there is nothing in this world that you can't or shouldn't think about through an ecological lens. But again, you know, if you can only do that, if you have a few students to try to do that for a huge class size it? So I'm a huge proponent of small classes.

Abena Ntoso: Yeah, and I've said many times that if there was one hill I was going to defend you know, as a teacher it would be the idea of small class sizes for all of those reasons that you're talking about. And I think, looking at you know this new age that we're entering, you know, leaving the industrial age where education was designed for efficiency and the mass production kind of mindset that we had during that period. To this information age, or even maybe we'll call it something different. Maybe we're past the Information age now. Maybe we're entering a whole new age that we have yet to name. But that that idea of small class sizes, I think, is one of the  the shifts that we'll need to in one way or another, embrace and and figure out how to do that and that that one on one you know aspect of education and you know, especially for writing, especially for writing, as you mentioned. You know, it's part of what helps someone develop is having someone else paying attention to their words and their ideas.

I've read Peter Elbow's work and teach many of the concepts he brings up in his approach to writing and one of the things he's written about is this idea that as a writer your writing improves when you have an audience you know, when you know that someone else is reading. Your writing is going to improve. But in order to get that going there has to be someone reading right? There has to be someone who's paying close enough attention that it's not just, you know, for a grade or a check the box, but that there's an actual intellectual conversation going on around these ideas and these thoughts and perspectives that that someone is exploring in their writing. 

So it it makes me very excited, you know, that I'm not the only one thinking about these things and supporting this idea of of smaller class sizes, and it also makes me wonder, you know, as we're thinking about what work looks like and we're also simultaneously thinking about women and gender issues, and then also simultaneously thinking about the environment.  I'd love to just do some brainstorming on, you know, what are some of the other things that we imagine will either need to be addressed, or other other ideas we imagine exploring more as we try to shift the way we go about work and life in this new age.

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah, you know, it's something. My husband and I were having an interesting conversation the other day. Because we're talking about men and masculinity and toxic masculinity and that sort of thing, and how one of the things that is bemoaned in these days is the loss of, you know, industry in this country, and, you know they don’t go work in the coal mines in the same way, or in the Ford factory, or you know, and that this was largely I mean, obviously women were employed, too, but a lot of these were jobs that men did, and we have swaths of populations and places in the country where particularly men are unemployed, and there's frustration and anger, and all of that. So we have gone through a shift, and I don't think any of that's coming back, you know. As much as you know there are some people who would like to bring all that back. I just you know, I don't think history happens like that, or the history of technology. 

But one thing we have a lot of is work in service industries or care industries and that sort of thing, and those are absolutely needed. But there's a way in which I think for some men, not all men, but for some men that is not something they feel comfortable doing. It feels demeaning. And I think if we could somehow do a lot of work to say no, that actually taking care of people medically, in education, you know, even serving food, that sort of thing, is a really important thing to do, and that men and women and everybody in between, you know, of any gender, taking care of people is is really important. And we need to pay to reflect that teachers, nurses, you know everybody who takes care of people should be paid well so that those jobs allow people to live, and that it reflects a kind of status that helps people want to go into them. 

So that's you know, again, if I could wave a magic wand, or or do something, I think if we could. It's kind of like, you know, the paradigm shift in ecological thinking. If we could have some kind of, in our society culture, some kind of paradigm shift in what we value as work and what we pay well as work and have it fit more with what actually is needed right now. Because for all the little talking robots, and you know, AI therapy and things like that, I think there is just something about human contact, eye contact, skin contact, all kinds of things, that is irreplaceable, at least in my imagination, and that we need. So to build on those kinds of things where there are going to be jobs that are jeopardized by AI. But to then insist on the things that are absolutely necessary, and to make you know whatever AI does that it’s in service to us, and not the other way around. So just finding the ways to do that, and the little ways to do that in our own jobs, our own social spheres. You know the things that we might have a little bit of capacity to do just to keep looking for those, I think, is important.

Abena Ntoso: Yeah, I also love this idea that you're bringing up of thinking about, well, what are the things about human beings that AI can't replace? And you're absolutely right, I mean this idea of being able to take care of one another and, you know, be present for one another, and to be able to engage with one another… That's something that, it's not the same if you allow that to be something that AI or computer systems take over. I mean, they can certainly be helpful in accomplishing that. But the actual work of it, the actual being there, the actual care, you know, that's something that AI can't replace and if we tried to, you know, that would be at a huge detriment to ourselves.

So it makes me think of… and I don't want to spoil the end of the book right? Because there's so many really wonderful ideas. It really is..

Laura-Gray Street: I love the way you're talking about a poetry collection like it’s a plot. That's great!

Abena Ntoso: It is, you know, because I felt like it was a journey, and there were, you know, there were new ideas that came up as I was reading, you know, as I reached different sections. So there were some ideas that we didn't even get to talk about but that I just loved, right, that sent me on a, on my own journey of researching and learning more about the cotton mill labor movements in the early 1930s, and music, and how the labor movements were really facilitated by radio and music.. and this is all from poetry. Right? I mean all from all from your poems. This is the wonderful thing about poetry is that it wasn't even that you were teaching these things through the poem. It's just that in writing the poem these things came into it. And then for me, you know, it was, “Wow! Wait, let me look this up,” you know, more about this, which I think is the beautiful thing about poetry, and the beautiful thing about your collection is that there are so many things to discover.

So not to spoil the end of the book. But there is a part in the last poem, a few lines that I found incredibly moving, and I think it applies, you know, in light of this conversation that we're having about the direction that work may be shifting to, or that we may need to explore as we move into this new age. So you have these lines that I'd love to have you speak more about, and I won't even say the title of the last poem because that gives an idea of the direction that you go in by the end, but I’ll just say the lines. So it's 

We'd
rather be one cog in the wheel of truth than
work the whole wheel in a machinery of lies.
Getting to the heart of things isn't reprising
where we started.

Laura-Gray Street: Cool.

Abena Ntoso: And that was just beautifully written, beautifully said, and so I'd love to have you speak more about those lines and share some of your thoughts and ideas.

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah. Okay. Well, I have to credit Mary Crovitt Hambage, the epigraph is from her book. “One cog in the wheel of truth” actually comes from something she wrote in there and then I start spinning off of it, which so my process is often that again, like I said, I rarely start with the idea of this is what I want to write, and I hate the blank page. It unnerves me. I have on a lot of my writing syllabi. The quote from the German novelist, Thomas Mann, a writer, is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others surprises a lot of students and also kind of reassures some of them because I do. I find writing actually, very hard writing. Starting something new is just a painful process to me. So what I would much prefer to do in a way that I get myself into writing is often poking around in other texts. Right? And I'm like a crow, I'm like looking for little shiny bits of language and pulling those out and then putting them on the page, and pushing them around, and then making them change and adapt and do something different. And that was very much the process of this book. I mean, it's a process that I do a lot, but this book was very intentionally… I did… had a whole writing process that I was trying to kind of mimic, the process of taking cotton and comb, you know, combing it and cleaning it and weaving, not exactly analogous, but I would have these steps, I would go through with it. 

There are many aspects to this, and one of the things in that poem that became a thing that was a surprising element in the book was the pronoun “we.” It was something I ended up thinking a lot about in the book, and there's some poems that are very specifically with this kind of collective voice. So it's not me trying to use the royal we like, “Oh, we love these things, don't we?” You know it's trying to more not have it centered around a single ego, meaning a single person, you know a singular “I” so much. I mean, there are those poems, but the we is a kind of refrain that happens. So it's like a chorus, you know, in the Greek, so you can see in some of those last poems a little bit of Greek, you know the some references there. Mary Hambage lived in Greece for a long time, learned a lot of weaving there, she worked with weavers and helped women like who were impoverished to sell their work, and she did some really amazing things. Also, my husband is a classicist, and we went to Greece for our honeymoon, and so there are little chiming echoes of those sorts of things in there. But that “we” chorus voice became very important to me. It gave itself to me. It wasn't something I went in search of, or thought about doing, so it was the voice of that we that is coming out at the end, saying, okay, here's where we are. This is how we wanna have our final word.

There's one poem in the book… 

Abena Ntoso: “Survey of Worker Engagement”

Laura-Gray Street: Yeah, “Survey of Worker Engagement,” and that was one where I was reading a lot of accounts and transcripts of oral interviews, and it was, you know, the pantoum form of it was not something I set out to write. The material itself sort of was suddenly like, “Oh, this needs to be a pantoum,” the kind of revolving, and also the “we” pronoun there, which is sort of grammatically incorrect, because it's referring to singular body parts, and yet it's about this body collective, the voice of women and the bodies of women that went into work and were often, you know, damaged in work in the textile mills. So it was sort of through that poem that the “we” came out very strongly, and then sort of appeared in other poems. So when I originally wrote that last poem, it was in the first person, and it just didn't feel right, and then, when I thought, “No, this ‘we’ voice, that's what this needs to be,” and then suddenly that was it. So, yeah.

Abena Ntoso: And I love that idea of, again, just thinking about approaching the writing and being open to discovery in the writing and and open to it not being what you originally set out to do, or originally set out to to write, or maybe not taking the form that you originally imagined, but really approaching it as as something that you're crafting, right?

Laura-Gray Street: … or that is crafting me. It often feels like that, yeah.

Abena Ntoso: Yes, yes, and in so many ways, I think, as a reader and as a writer, you know, the writing crafts us, you know the writing allows us to see things differently. The process of writing allows us to explore, and then to arrive at places that we maybe would not have if we just kept it in our heads, and so that process of discovery is also what makes it so much fun, and so enlightening. And on that note this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for…

Laura-Gray Street: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this. Yeah.

Abena Ntoso: Oh, this is… so… There are so many things that you have mentioned that I have thought about myself. But then there are so many things that never occurred to me. And so the conversation itself, being an opportunity to you know, brainstorm and think together, and I just feel very, very grateful that you've taken this time with me. Thank you so much.

Laura-Gray Street: Thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure. 

Abena Ntoso: We’ve been talking today with poet Laura-Gray Street. You’ve been listening to Backlit, and I am your host, Abena Ntoso. You can find more of Laura-Gray’s work at lauragraystreet.com. Her most recent book, Just Labor, along with the ecopoetry anthologies she has co-edited, are available for purchase using the link in the episode details. Today’s episode was produced in my home studio in Houston, Texas, in conjunction with Bricolage Lit, and features the song “Campfire” by Midnight Daydream in the intro and outro. For more information on Backlit, please visit abenantoso.com/podcast/backlit. Thank you for listening, and until next time, be well, read books, and let’s generate some new ideas together.