JN: No. I read a lot, but I didn’t write. SD: I didn’t either. I guess there were a couple of poems. My mom found a journal from high school that had a poem in it. I think I must’ve written it for class because I don’t actually remember writing it. I didn’t write at all, but I read voraciously. Then, when I was seventeen, a bunch of us went to a quarry, and my friend died in an accident. He drowned. We couldn’t save him. When that happened, I dropped out of high school. For some reason—I get asked this question a lot, but I still can’t get it right—I started writing in a notebook. I would just hang out all day and write. I started working, washing dishes, and I’d write about that. That’s when I really got started. That was the first time I got the relationship between being able to process my internal emotional states and my negotiations with grief. I think that’s one of the things that really helped. Waitress: I’ll be right back with your coffee. And your white toast is coming. JN: Sorry? W: Your white toast is coming. JN: Thank you. SD: So that was the first time I started to actually write. I couldn’t do that for a long, long time. Then I was involved in a lot of performance stuff. It was the early eighties. I was involved in some hip hop stuff. We had a sort of loose association with this group called 32B (Three Two B). We used to do shows. I was about eighteen, nineteen. My co MC Blanca Ceceres cut a record on Select Records with Roger Hicks who did one of the remixes for Too Live Crew. So all of them, they went on. But I stopped doing that. I just started working. I went back to high school, and I finished up. I started working blue collar jobs. I worked for the phone company. I tried to go back to school. I took a freshman comp. course, and I had this student teacher, Gail Rondo. I think I wrote an essay on working in the warehouse, and she said I should read Phillip Levine. So I went to the library and got Phillip Levine out, one of his early books. I can see the cover. It’s like Near Somewhere or something like that. A lot of it’s about the Spanish Civil War. And then I just started going through all of his books. When I found his poems about working in Detroit, it was the first time I’d really seen poems about what I was doing. I just felt so located. That’s when I really started to write. There was poetry in my house. We were poor, but we always had tons of books. My parents really encouraged me. I was very lucky to have them.
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