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 just 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 Jennifer Eli Bowen. Jen is a writer, arts instructor, editor, and founding artist director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Her essay collection, The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There, was released in 2025, and her work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, the Tim McGinnis Award, and has appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review. Orion, and Kenyon Review, among others. Jen teaches creative writing in prisons across the state of Minnesota, and also teaches at local colleges. Jen, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah, thank you for having me, Abena. I'm very excited to chat with you tonight.

Abena Ntoso: Your book explores an intersection between lots of different ideas. You bring in parenting and your father's life and then also the absence of your father and the impact it had on your life… your own work as a writer, your work as an instructor and an advocate for men who are in prison and your own growth and development as a mom and as a writer, as a human being. So there are so many ideas that go into this book. I'd love to, um, open with a reading from one of the essays in the book. This one is from an essay called “The Library,” And it is, uh, on page 109 to 110. Would you be, uh, okay with reading that passage for us?

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah, you bet.

We need constant proof that we're not alone. And if we don't see a companion, we strain to hear them in the dark. And when there is no whistle in return? We make one up.

I notice it, especially, with a few of my students who have been locked up for decades. I have to be so careful about what I say in class, what assignments I give. Sometimes a book I share feels like a helpful whistle in the dark. Occasionally it is received in ways I did not intend. Such exchanges are not unique to people who are locked away from the world, though. I think every one of us has a tiny detector buried somewhere deep inside our heart, and when we become dangerously lonesome, it blinks awake and works to pick up a signal in the world.

Abena Ntoso: Thank you so much. I love that passage because it is an intro into the whole reason for writing and for bringing literature and writing into situations where people do need to have a voice. So I'd love to hear from you how all of these ideas came together, and what this idea of being able to send out a signal in the world and express oneself, how that has played a part in your development of your literary work.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah. Well, the easiest way to answer how the ideas all came together is it's the only way my brain works. It's somewhat frenetically and I didn't know for the longest time if that was okay. Like, I did not know that you did not have to write a straight linear narrative essay without gaps, with white space. I didn't… I just didn't know. And one day I picked up a book and saw that the writer allowed gaps in chronology and in the narrative, and then I realized, okay, so that's allowed. That suits my brain and suits the way I live in the world, which may have something to do with all the absences in my life and all of the sort of blinking we do, you know, if you spend a lot of time in your own headspace trying to find what's missing in your life, I think you miss some of the through lines that are right in front of your face, right? They're those narratives that we can miss if we're more in tune to the kind of interior, or trying to create our own narrative, so, um, that's a big messy answer.

Abena Ntoso: You do embrace that idea of the gaps, that idea of writing in fragments and bringing fragments together Rather than looking at the absences and the downfall of it, you actually write into that, and you actually use that as a form of experimenting with structure and trying something new with structure.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: I think with writing and life, it's the case that sometimes it's not that we get innovative, it's that we're forced to innovate, you know what I mean? We just get stuck, and you get really tired of being stuck after a while, and what happens when you're sick of the stuckness is the accidental solution.

Abena Ntoso: Yes, yes, yes. And speaking of stuckness and just trying to find a way into the story, your book opens with the exploration of the things that you discovered about your father, and your father had been absent for most of your life, and as you sorted through physical and social remnants of his life, you made all of these discoveries that you created as a list which became a vivid portrait of him, and it's really amazing because it is very difficult to learn about the life of someone when you were isolated from them or they were isolated from you, and when they were isolated from society in general, and I know that there are a lot of people who have situations where they may not have had a relationship with a parent or a relationship with someone who is very important in their lives. If you want to explore that and you want to incorporate that aspect of your identity into your writing, how do you recreate from such little information. How did you go about that, and what was that process like?

Jennifer Eli Bowen: The biggest struggles of my entire creative career was wanting to write into the void. Essentially, there's only so much you can say about that that does not exist, you know what I mean? That's it, it doesn't exist. And so, when I first started to write, I thought I was going to write a memoir about my dad, and it just became challenging, frustrating, and then, frankly, boring, because you can't make a human come alive on the page any more than you've known them to be. I mean, you can, fiction does it all the time, but you know, I wanted to know him, that was why I was writing him. I could create a picture of a person, but it didn't change the fact that I never knew him. It never made him present for me as a father in the literal sense. And that was frustrating, too. But I discovered something that was really exciting to me as a writer, and that I also would love as a teacher, especially a teacher in prison, where there are these long, long absences that people endure.

Speculating is how we live as humans in the world, and I don't think I knew that until I had to do it in my writing and then named it. So much of our relationships with people known and unknown are the product of our own imaginations, and so, I started to have a lot of fun imagining what we would have had, what we didn't have, you know, what he might have worn, what he might have thought, because in the end, I think that's all I could do, and that was a way of exploring him, and also exploring what was missing for me, all the stuff that I wouldn't have known otherwise. Yeah, the more I write about what didn't exist with my father, the more I'm convinced that sometimes the missing spaces are the most fruitful in our human relationships, the stuff we haven't filled in. Because that's where our fears are, our vulnerabilities, like all the stuff we haven't unpacked, even if, say, you live with your dad and you grow up with him, the unknown is always ripe, because there's a reason it's unknown. It's a secret. It's tender, you know, that's where the magic is, it turns out. Sometimes painful magic, but yeah.

Abena Ntoso: And I love the fact that throughout the book, as you're bringing in those moments of, this is what I imagine he might have said or he might have thought, or he might have experienced. Having those lacunae, I’ll call them lacunae, and being okay with that, letting that be an inspiration for imagination.

I think for a lot of folks, and I have this happen often when I'm trying to write into something that I don't have a lot of information about, there’s a feeling that there’s so much that other people can say when they… when they know all of their heritage, and all of the details of their ancestors, and their family and when you don't have that, you can feel almost like you're at a deficit. It can feel almost like, well, then who am I to write this, right? 

I love the way you use those spaces, those gaps of information as opportunities to imagine, and not that you are trying to write the story as it is, but you're trying to write the story as what you are trying to make sense of.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. No, you, you said it exactly the way I experienced it, that frustration of seeing other people render these rich, dynamic, deep family connections, and I didn't realize it for years that I've just always carried kind of ambiguous grief around not having that. A friend of mine who writes gorgeous fiction and nonfiction, and she happens to live on this beautiful hill in a small town in Vermont that her grandparents, maybe even great-grandparents, grandparents at least, purchased and built on, and then her parents, you know, built their place, and then she built her place, and so these generations literally have lived on the same land, and they see each other, and they do all these beautiful things together, and when she writes, this sense of belonging and rootedness, like she knows the smell of her grandmother's cutting board. Do you know how jealous that makes me? Are you kidding me? You can write about the smell of your grandmother's cutting board? That's so incredible. I got nothing. So yeah, imagination is what I have, I have all of the things that I don't know. 

Abena Ntoso: That’s one of the things that drew me to your work, the structure and the motifs that came up over and over in the book. It gives a validation and permission for people who would otherwise feel like, what right do I have to write. That’s the beautiful thing about it. 

I'm thinking about this idea of exclusion from society, which is what the book also necessarily has to explore because of your work with folks who are imprisoned. You have this profound understanding of what it means to say that someone is isolated from society and looking at what happens in those cases. You looked at different prison systems and juxtaposed a prison system in the U.S, specifically Angola prison versus some of the prison systems in Norway, and how they have made incredible efforts to keep the humanity of what it means to have someone removed from the population because of harm done, but not to remove their humanity. This idea of, “Is there a prison that doesn't make humans lose their mind?” And there's a quote that you have here, in this essay, “I'm eager to relinquish all skepticism and accept that there is a system in which someone who has caused harm can get better without that same system causing more harm in turn.” So, I'm really curious about this idea of what dignity and humanity might look like in the context of a justice system that deals with human beings whose trauma or neglect has brought harm, but they themselves are often victims of trauma and neglect.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah. Someone asked me a long time ago how I felt about work, you know, offering something to people who had caused harm, and what did I say to the victims, and not that it's this simplistic, but I said, I work with students on memoir, and we start in early childhood. I am working with the victims. Like, that's how this cycle works, you know what I mean? Not to oversimplify it, but, um, there's really very rarely ever anyone who's doing 20 years in prison who didn't experience a lot of harm themselves. So that gets really complicated and a system that's intent on not offering any healing is pretty detrimental to all of society, right? It just doesn't fix the problem. Like, it can't… it has to be a loop, and this is what restorative justice practitioners have been telling us forever, that we're all interconnected, that if one person in our community is hurting, then we are all going to be hurting, you know? Healing is mutual. Those aren't new concepts, but looking at the way they're enacted in the prison system… It's interesting. 

Sometimes I feel like it mattered to me because I knew my dad had done even just a little bit of time. His separation for me had nothing to do with prison. He self-separated from us, and so that was his choice, and I always want to make it clear that, like, the reason he was not around was not because he did a little time in jail, it was because he just was not around. But knowing he had been part of that system, which I didn't even realize until four years into my teaching career in prison. Knowing that gives you a different kind of ownership, like, I can talk about my dad certain ways, and I can think about what I would like to have my dad experience, but you don't get to make my dad experience that, and you don't get to treat him this way, you know, that whole family connection, even though I didn't really know him, it felt more personal when I found that out.

I am now in my 15th year of teaching, and it is the case that I've worked with many people who are still there 15 years in, and you know how it is when you read somebody's writing, you get to know them pretty well through their work. Even if you're exercising all the appropriate student-instructor professional boundaries, you still learn a lot about someone, and you exchange a mutual trust and a mutual commitment, and so you get to know them well, and in that sense, it started to matter a lot, too. I mean, it should always matter to all of us whether we have a connection or not, because we're part of the human race, and our humanity matters. 

It’s interesting, when I was putting the book together, because it was written over such a long period of time, I could see my thinking about the carceral state really evolve in ways that almost felt embarrassing to me, but writing does this to us. It reveals our change in thinking, and so sometimes we look back and we’re embarrassed, right, by our, like, earlier, less evolved thought processes, or, you know, seeing the kind of more raw understanding that we have before it grows more nuanced. I think there was a time when I thought, you know, what's a humane prison versus what is not? And now I think I feel differently about it. I don't think it's a binary, I think it's on a continuum, and I think I have been made to understand by the folks I've worked with, men and women, that no matter how humane, being separated from your family and your community is a torture. Like, it just is. It doesn't matter how beautiful. It could be a stinkin' castle, right? But if you're locked in at night and you don't have control over when you see your loved ones, that's a severing, that's a salt severing, right? 

So, in that sense there's no, you know, no reason to idealize any one prison, but in the Norwegian prisons, for example, just one of the very simple rules for both incarcerated individuals and the staff was that eye contact is mandatory. That's a really small thing, but if you go years and years and years without anyone shaking your hand or making eye contact with you, I imagine it's hard to feel like you're embodied, that you exist, that you matter. And then, of course, the prison rodeo essay shows much more extreme examples of violence and inhumanity. Yeah, I think, the Norwegian prison has a lot of material kindnesses that I think make people feel like they're living under less severity, the conditions are better, the food is better, the things they offer are more enriching, more engaging. But the thing, probably, that I think is the healthiest is that they try to keep you connected to human kindness and human connection, rather than severing it.

Abena Ntoso: I like that your work, both on the page and off the page keeps coming back to this idea of human connection, and absence versus being there. I love that you emphasize that the connection is very important, and when that's severed it's incredibly painful. I think this idea of downplaying the impact that a forced disconnection has shows up in so many areas. It shows up in the work that you do, and in our prison system in general. I know there's been a lot of push to revise our prison system and our justice system in general. We are long overdue for revising it, but it's tough for people to think that things could be done any other way.

How do we repair the disconnect that people have when they don't fully understand how important connection is, social connection is. I'm thinking about the pieces in the book that explore your experience parenting because you have a lot of really beautiful moments that you share, from your experience with your sons, and so I'm thinking about how that informs your work, how it's made you see love and life differently.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: I think that the book itself, the process of writing it alongside the work I've been doing in prisons, really did teach me, like, really did just kind of hold my hand and teach me permanence, because another piece that we haven't talked about is how much moving I did as a kid, and we've touched on what feels to me like a tragic lack of, you know, rootedness. Being in the Twin Cities, I think I'm going on, let’s see, my fourt— my sixteenth year in the Twin Cities, which is by far the longest I've ever lived anywhere. At the same time, I had moved somewhere and was finally staying, started working with a population that is pretty used to severing. 

I often tell new instructors, a lot of our students, if they haven't experienced abandonment when they come into the system, it's almost a byproduct of it, because it's really, really hard for friends and family to stay connected to people who endure a 10-, 20-, 30-year bid. And I knew that because of the work my students were doing, that, you know, they were sharing constantly stuff about empty mail slots, and phone calls that no longer got picked up, you know, just connections gradually dissipating, which is part of life, but it's an exceptionally frequent part of life during incarceration. And so, much like love and absence, the flip side of people fading away is what, you know, what happens when you stick around, or when you stay.

And I, of course, couldn't help but be aware of the idea of absence when I started parenting my own kids and wanting to be present for them. I still failed them, like, you can be physically present in a room and not be present. And that was, um… you just don't know what you don't know, you know what I mean? When you're there, walking them to school every day, you know, just physically present, that feels like such an improvement on your own experience that you can miss some things, which they have lovingly let me know I missed. So there are lots of different ways to be present and to not be absent, and I'm still working on that. 

Probably more than anything else I've learned from the book, it was what it means to stay put because I haven't had that experience before and one of the things that surprised me was how hard it can be sometimes if you're used to leaving when things get tricky. It’s pretty natural to think, like, this actually sucks.  Someone said something rude to me, or people are fighting now, and I'm tired of this same old argument, or this pattern that we all have, and the book helps me realize, yeah, that's what happens when you don't go. Like, you still have to work through stuff, you don't get to just leave it. 

Abena Ntoso: I would love to hear more about the ways that writing the book has helped you be more present in situations where it would have felt easier or more natural to disconnect? And also to be there, to not leave situations where you might have felt like it's easier to just leave. And I'm asking that, but not with the assumption that it's always best to stay; there are, of course, situations where, you know, it's like—

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. 

Abena Ntoso: —and you even tough on some of those. But, in what ways has writing the book helped you with being more present?

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, the book itself… I won't say it helped me learn how to be more present for others. It actually probably did the opposite, truthfully. Like, because you're always plotting a book and thinking through the essay and refining a sentence, and I think that the book is actually in part what helped me fail at that. Because it felt like a reasonable excuse, right? You have work in the world that people will tell you is valid and important work, and then you have work in the book that is valid and a reasonable pursuit. And so, if you are immersed in those things, who is going to fault that? And that's not right. I mean, it's… it's not right. And so I think that the… I mean, of course we can still do the things we need to do, but I think I allowed both my work and also the writing of the book to probably take up more of my mental space than has been fair to the people in my life which I only realized when the book was done. 

I used to always joke with new instructors, like, you can text me any time of day, you can call me any time of day, you can email, you know, it doesn't matter. I flirt with burnout. That was, like, my joke. Then one day, it was like, oh, no, we're not flirting anymore. Burnout and I, we're really in a deep relationship here. 

So, I don't… I don't actually think the book helped me figure out how to be present, but it has helped me understand more about staying put, for sure, and in ways that I am actually really proud of, because sometimes we can articulate things to ourselves in writing. I'm not always able to articulate stuff when I say it aloud, when I'm in conversation with people, but… but if I wrestle with it on the page long enough, I can start to see it more clearly, and one thing I started to see more clearly is sometimes problems are sticky, and I didn't realize until I wrote about stuff for years that I would let friendships fade away if something difficult happened and that was maybe because there were moments that I wasn't willing to articulate what I needed, or what had hurt me, or what had felt unfair.  

And so part of sticking around is just being uncomfortable with people sometimes until you get through it. I haven't had to practice that too terribly much in my life, because when you move, you can leave a really dear friend, and you haven't left her, it's just you got moved from each other, you know what I mean? You can stay in touch over a text message and an occasional holiday visit. But when you stay in town, and you're part of a shared community, which I am, and I'm really grateful for it, you have to deal with the messes, and the book helped me see that. I'm really grateful for that.

Abena Ntoso: I'm really interested in this idea of what you did gain, because it is so true, the fact that when you are writing a book it does take you away from people and relationships, and it does make it more difficult to be as present as you would have hoped to be. But then what you're speaking to is also this idea of what was gained and, and you mentioned gaining the ability to articulate what being there is to you. And so I'm really interested in this idea of how the time spent writing and the time spent trying to articulate in a way that feels truthful and authentic to you and what you're trying to express, how that presents a trade-off, because you have that time spent away, but much is gained that may make you a much better friend or a much better parent, or a much better colleague or instructor. So I'm curious, about some ways that you feel like you are a better parent, friend, instructor, colleague, even though you had to and have to disconnect in order to do the work that makes you a better person.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: I hope it has done that. I had never really looked at it like that before, and I'm really moved by the possibility that that could be true. I don't know if it is, I hope so. To be really honest, when I finished the book, I was kind of mad at it. I mean, I knew what I was doing, obviously. I was exposing myself, I was exposing my family, my kids, my mom, you know, I was writing about the people that matter the most to me. Even my ex-husband, there was so much tenderness around, like… You know what I mean? Like, how do you tell somebody else's story fairly in a way that's just responsible and loving? And I felt really mad at the book for, like… and mad at my ambition at wanting to write a book, because I thought, was it worth it in the end? Like, was it worth hurting anyone? Was it worth being away from people? I was really mad at it, and I’m… it's almost funny to me now, but before my book launch, I was really cranky with my book. I felt super nervous about having done something that was gonna cause harm more than anything else. So the idea that what you're saying, that maybe it helped me evolve, or deepen as a person or, you know, grow, that I can be a better human in the world because of it, that feels good, like, okay, that's a trade-off. I'll take that.

You know, really small examples. It's… it's not an essay that anyone ever really talks to me about, but it was hard for me to write is, “Music in the Midway” that just deals with a neighbor, and there was something really instructive about this immediate problem, literally screaming outside your door, non-stop, and it's not going away. I'm not selling my house, this man is going to keep screaming, and everyone's gonna get rid of him, and the solution is no longer moving. Also, I don't believe in the solution of just locking a mentally ill human up in a cage, you know? And then extrapolating that to the rest of my life and realizing, oh, wow, I am a hypocrite. Like, I don't think people should go to prison, but we create our own tiny prisons all the time. And I definitely created little prisons in my marriage and with friends, you know what I mean? Like, in maybe non-combative ways, but kind of, um someone may use the term passive-aggressive, or, you know, silencing. These little severings. Again, it goes back to the connection, like, the ways we leave people. Emotionally or intimately, I enacted that all the time, which is a form of leaving. 

So that was really eye-opening to me and instructive and challenging to think, ugh, so you have to just keep staying with this. This is miserable. But there have been instances before with people where I would have just let it go because it wasn't worth the conflict but it would have created this kind of toxic rot, ultimately, over time, where the relationship would have dissolved and there have been very conscious moments after having written that essay in particular where I've had to stop and think this is what community means. This is what connection means. Right here, take a deep breath, try again. And most of the time, I would say, it's been really moving to see, like, you can get to the other side of something like that with someone. We have the hardest time healing old patterns, childhood patterns and all that stuff with our romantic partners, because they most closely resemble our parents, right? But we have a much easier time doing that work with friends, colleagues, you know, neighbors, and I have definitely noticed that to be the case. Like, okay, I can definitely make improvements with colleagues, with friends. I can see these patterns, and I feel some efficacy and some tools around fixing it, which in this case means staying in it. 

Abena Ntoso: Yes, yes, and in fact, it makes me think of a book that I'm actually reading now called Connect Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues. by David Bradford and Carol Robin, based on a course they teach at Stanford Business School. I used to read books like this to learn all these skills, and then as I got older, I was like, oh, I'm gonna read just literature now, but then there have been moments in my life where I realized, you know what, I think I really should read a book about—

Jennifer Eli Bowen: That's got some answers, for God's sake.

Abena Ntoso: Yeah, exactly! Like, there are definitely some skills I can be using here. There are some ways I can do this a little better than I'm doing it right now.

What you're describing makes me think of some of the points they make in the book that I think also lead back to the idea of being able to articulate and clarify what something is, to name it and to say it and then to also know what it looks like. Taking the time to write is a gift to yourself and to others because it does allow you to show up as someone who can communicate in a way that is closer to what you really feel and what you really think. 

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah. Yeah. That feels hopeful to me. I also think generationally we have these cycles that we try to break, and sometimes it's hard to do if you can't see them. And so, my hope is that, you know, my kids and their kids, we’ll have new problems that are more evolved than the ones we've had by virtue of us doing this work. That's some of the hope.

Abena Ntoso: Do you have some thoughts and ideas that writing the book and publishing the book has given you for going forward, because you are a leader in the Minnesota literary community and the work that you have done with prison workshops and the work that you have done as a writer and editor are all very much helping others to be able to experience those same kinds of benefits from writing. Are there things that you… that you hope and wish and see that you would love  expand upon or love to see happen if it was possible to get everyone on board with this? 

Jennifer Eli Bowen: That's a big question. I love dreaming of things, and the really amazing thing… I think about the whole world, truthfully, but especially about the Twin Cities, is that if you want something, it seems to me the world also wants to say yes. Like, I really believe people want to say yes to new ideas more than they want to say no. And I learned pretty early on in the building of Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and in the community inside, with students who were already building their own arts community, that everyone wants to be excited. We all want to be part of something new and meaningful, and so starting stuff is actually not that hard because it's thrilling, and on a practical level, not many people realize that there's more arts funding in the state of Minnesota per capita than just about any other state in the country. It's an exceptionally well-funded state, which makes so many big dreams possible on an individual level, on a community level. It's an incredible thing, and the amount of money that it is is really miniscule for the state's budget. So, lesson to all the other, you know, states in our country, so much thriving happens because of a tiny appropriation in the budget. Which is to say, I've been super, super lucky and learned over the years that the hardest is to filter out what you want to do, like, to stop having ideas, right? Because people will yes all day long, and especially in the Twin Cities, where the artists, we do too much because we can, and so to me, the hardest thing is sustaining it. Like, right? Once we have a big idea. 

Here's the part where I'm gonna be a downer. I'm tired, like, it's just… it was a lot… The community, the building, and then a lot that's been going on in the community and everyone trying to support each other in the way that we should. I feel like I need a little bit of rest before I figure out what comes next. But other people are doing really new and exciting things, and I think maybe I'll find a way to support some of their ideas. There was a time when I couldn't turn my brain off, you know, and it was just one thing after another, like, and if we go to this facility, and if we open that, and if we offer this type of class, and I don't know, I think sometimes it's important to hear our body and hear that, like—is it the fertile versus fallow periods? Does that sound right? I feel bad admitting it, because I think that the more inspiring answer is, like, yes, here's six more things I'd love to do, but the truth is, I think it's really human to want to rest a little bit, like, maybe not meaning do no work, but not build something right this moment. I think that's what I want to do. I want to read a lot of other people's words and other people's ideas and maybe support other folks who are doing cool stuff right now. And I also firmly, firmly believe that after doing that, my brain will start talking to me again and have all kinds of ideas, and I will have a hard time saying no to them.

Abena Ntoso: I love that. As you were speaking and explaining the sense of exhaustion that's settling in, it was making me think about cycles and, the importance of embracing this idea that we have to go through cycles and we have to go through different seasons, even in terms of our creative work. I love that idea, and I think something that, again, you know, like downplaying the importance of human connection, there's sometimes this tendency to downplay periods of downtime that are necessary, and necessary in an ongoing, day-to-day basis, but also throughout a year or throughout a decade, you’re gonna need times to really have some, some rest.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: I think so. It's just the system we work under, where productivity is prized, and newness is valued, and product is expected, and I get it, but also, it's not the healthiest system to live within. I mean, it’s just entrenched, but we can at least be aware of it, and defy it a little bit when we try to take a deep breath, not produce something for a second. 

Abena Ntoso: And I think even articulating it, you know, conversations like the one we're having, you know, and people who are writing about it, you know, it may not seem like the most ambitious, and it's not what people always want to hear when you're asked, so what's next, right? But it’s a very true thing. I've been in situations where you do great work and then it's like, great, so we want you to get even better and better and better and better and it's like..

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Right? Exactly. That's exactly right. Where is that coming from? And who is it serving? Who is it serving, is the other question. Yeah, no, a friend and colleague of mine worked for a national nonprofit once, and she just did an incredible job, and every year she… that was essentially their question, like, what's next, what's next? She said that they just wanted bigger, faster, better, bigger, faster, better, and I remember her using those exact words and saying them very quickly, and  it’s true, like, even a non-profit that's doing really good work can sometimes be guilty of that. I'm not saying that ours is, we try very hard to make it meaningful and purposeful and not, you know, not chasing novelty for the sake of it, but even well-meaning work can ask us to be bigger, faster, better in different ways, and I think it's okay to resist that sometimes. Let's be slower and the same. And just okay as we are. For a second. Yeah.

Abena Ntoso: You have brought up so many aspects of love and absence and being there, and I just really appreciate your insight into this, your willingness to bring together the personal, the social, and societal, and all of these things in your work and in your exploration of these ideas and then to also talk about it with me. I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Eli Bowen: Yeah, thank you. Uh, this has been a rare, really just enriching and thoughtful conversation, and I appreciate it so much. I… I think you have ruined me for… for new conversations. I'm gonna say, no one… no one's doing the work you do. It's really wonderful. Thank you so much for your really careful attention to all the things I had to say, I appreciate it so much.

Abena Ntoso: We've been talking today with writer Jennifer Eli Bowen. You've been listening to Backlit, and I'm your host, Abena Ntoso. You can find more of Jen's work at jenniferelibowen.com. Her debut book, The Book of Kin, is 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.