Cole Arthur Riley on 'We did good'

29 Apr

The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May:
Cole Arthur Riley on 'We did good'

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This week Katherine chats to writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies.

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Listen to the Episode

Katherine May:
It's the end of a long day at my desk. I've had a lot to catch up with, but it's been on Easter holiday. So I have been hanging out with him, which is always lovely. And also my office has been decorated over the last couple of weeks. Well, actually it feels like longer than that, because I started decorating my office and then it got overwhelmed with stacked up boxes where I was doing other stuff in the house as is always the case my office incidentally, I'd like to a bitterly say that my office is the dumping ground for the rest of the house. I dream of a room of my own. And then I couldn't really get in there. And then a nice man called Dan came and painted it for me last week. And then of course I had to clean it all out again. It feels like a long time since I could get back in there and not be huddled on the dining room table, trying to make the best of things.

Katherine May:
And today I got back in and it's looking lovely. There's finally more than enough space for all my books, which is something of a first for me. I don't know what to do with all the space. It's really exciting. So yeah, I caught up on a few things today, but now I've just come down to the beach to catch the sun for a little while. I've got my summer dress on. I'm feeling springy. I think I'm having a time of sorting things out at the moment. I'm thinking about my working space and I've been busy with loads of other things too. I've got a strange time ahead for the next year in that my book is ready to go and it's a year until it's published. So that leaves me with an odd piece of time because it's too early to write the next book.

Katherine May:
I write books in quite a short period of time if I can. It's too soon and yet what will I do? What will I be if I'm not writing a book? There's this fear that rises up in me that I'll forget how to write somehow, or that I'll lose the knack. And I think in a way that's a valid fear. It's something that's a muscle writing or any creative practice. You have to keep moving. You have to keep doing it. So I've been looking for what I should do for the next while. I've got a few thoughts. Every night I go to bed and I dream a different novel. It's really funny, my brain is trying to make helpful suggestions for me. Maybe I'll write one of them who knows. Had a really good one about hotel last night, we'll see.

Katherine May:
But also I have been sorting out all my other things too. I'm revamping my newsletter, which I tried to revamp last year and didn't do it very well. So I'm doing another revamp. You'll see that soon. And I'm working with an amazing illustrator who is going to make it look beautiful, which it hasn't before. So excited to show you that. Watch this space, I'll let you know. And I guess I'm just trying to set everything to write, get my bookshelves in order. Sometimes you got to do that. It's lovely to be down here. I'm standing by the edge of the sea next to one of the wave breaks that's covered in beautiful bladder wrack sea weed, which is what I have tattooed on my arms now. And I've just noticed by my feet, there's an open clamshell. I'm going to pick it up. One of the double ones, that's still attached. It's beautiful colour pink inside like a butterfly. I'll never stop enjoying seashells and taking them home.

Katherine May:
Which brings me neatly to the conversation you're about to listen to with the author and spiritual teacher, Cole Arthur Riley, who it was just such a pleasure to talk to. I wasn't sure if she'd say yes when I asked her and I was so thrilled that she did, because it's wonderful to connect with people who've got such a beautiful engagement with the world. And she so often talks about wonder in her book, This Here Flesh. And about how wonder can flow through every day things and make the everyday luminous and how in many ways that's so much more important than these very distant ideas of a grand God who is making the rules in some far away place. Anyway, I think you'll love her. Do take a listen and I'll see you again in a while.

Katherine May:
Cole, welcome to The Wintering Sessions. I am so thrilled to have you on the podcast for loads of reasons, actually. Partly because I just loved your book.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.

Katherine May:
But also, I wanted to talk to you because, I'm English as you can well tell, and we have a very awkward relationship with talking about spirituality in the UK. We are self-conscious about it and we are avoidant of it. And I know that it's really hard to publish books about any kind of spiritual issue in my country, because even like religious folk don't tend to engage in that conversation. It's this thing that very embarrassed about, and I'm trying to get better about talking about it and about hearing other people's perspectives too. And I feel like Americans are much better at this than us

Cole Arthur Riley:
Maybe.

Katherine May:
Yeah, Well, yeah. I know it's kind of complicated, but there isn't that absolute kind of sucking in of breath and drawing away that we certainly have. And I was laughing on Sunday because the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Easter sermon made this proclamation, not proclamation, maybe that's the wrong word, but said that God would judge the government for the way they're treating Ukrainian refugees. And there was this kind of big political consensus in the UK that he shouldn't have brought God into it. And I thought, well, that tells you a lot about where we are in the UK, that we don't even think the Archbishop of Canterbury should bring God into anything, which is a nice summary of what we're like here.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Oh.

Katherine May:
But you are the founder of Black Liturgies, can you describe that a little for us because it's something I follow on Instagram and it's this very beautiful account?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Sure. Yeah. Well first I'll just say on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Americans who are just really excited to have a religion be supreme and to kind of triumph. And so sadly I think many Americans kind of use it as an excuse to talk maybe too much in order to have their spiritual belief system seem kind of larger then. And so it's really complicated. And so when I started Black Liturgies, I think I've always been kind of aware of that tension, that temptation to make any one spirituality supreme and to make spirituality more about being right than about conveying what it means to be human, what it means to love and what it means to grieve. I think there's always this temptation to kind of prove one's rightness and capital T truth.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And I wanted to resist that when I started Black Liturgies and kind of have this spiritual space that maybe felt more liberating in a way that would allow for a transparency that I'm speaking out of a Christian tradition, informed in a Christian tradition, but I never want to cling too tightly to any doctrine. I don't necessarily feel people sometimes are frightened by this, but I don't necessarily feel an allegiance to Christianity. I more so feel this allegiance to the questions of what it means to be human, a kind of fidelity to being a person that asks questions of the spiritual. I try to convey that in Black Liturgies and I connect and centre black emotion and black literature in the black body. And I connect that with the spiritual practice of written prayer and usually have some kind of breath exercise as well.

Katherine May:
Yes. Breath is so important to you and it's part of this sense that you are writing about day to day survival about the kind of realities of living and that kind of embodied experience.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. And I think, I mean, because of how I've chosen to share Black Liturgies initially through Instagram, and still early through Instagram, I felt like I really needed to be responsible with people's bodies because I know what social media can do. I know what these algorithms were created by very brilliant people who have learned how to keep us disembodied and scrolling. And I thought if I'm going to kind use this as a tool, I want to be able to try to draw people out and into their own bodies and whether they practice it or not, I wish I could tell but I think there's something of a dare in it like it's daring you when you scroll past it and something's telling you inhale and exhale, it's, at least I find it difficult not to practice that. So sure yeah, I incorporate breath a lot.

Katherine May:
And having that pause in that stream of information that we are scrolling through, your posts always make me just stop just for a moment in my endless scrolling, because they do invite me to do something very deliberately with my body, which I need to do. I live in my head all the time. I'm a writer, that's what I do. It's very hard to find that contact with the physical corporeal world sometimes for me.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I absolutely resonate with that and I can just be in my head for hours and completely forget. And when I kind of come to, I realize like my shoulder is hurting or my back is hurting just because of the way I've been sitting, but I've been so kind of out of my own body, I wasn't able to sense it. Anyways, I'm just realising these things about myself that have been true all my life, but I'm starting to put language to them and realising so much of it is grounded in disembodiment and yeah.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And it's all connected. Well, let's start talking about you because you are such a storyteller and what I loved in This Here Flesh was this sense that your stories and your family's stories are all completely intertwined as if their stories are your stories, like as if you kind of inherited them genetically somehow.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.

Katherine May:
And I loved this idea that you were a child who didn't really speak much, who chose to be mute for the longest time. Can you tell us a little bit about that and set the stage for me?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Sure. So you can picture four to six year old Cole was very, very shy and a very anxious child, I would walk around with my ears just tucked into my shoulders and very distinct from people in my family. So my family is just, they're lovely and loud and boisterous and chaotic and very charismatic and winsome and charming. And I am perhaps the only reserved person in my family. Reserved and quiet. So there are these home videos of everyone in the kitchen laughing and carrying on, and then the camera just pans to Cole sitting at a window still, staring sadly and long longingly out the window, or I could be found in closets kind of tucked away, reading Goosebumps books or things like that. So I was very reserved and very solitary, but a lot of that was born of anxiety as well.

Cole Arthur Riley:
So I had a fairly common childhood anxiety disorder called selective mutism and I would find myself unable to speak around certain groups of people or strangers. And so I've a lot of memories of even wanting to speak, but feeling this bodily resistance, and feeling like I couldn't say what I needed to say. I tell a story in the book about getting my hands stuck in one of our screen doors and my father had friends over and my aunt was in the living room and there were people I didn't know in the house. And so I didn't cry out for help, just this little girl just writhing and knowing-

Katherine May:
Quietly being in terrible pain.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Just praying that his eyes just come over this way and see me. And yeah, if you read the book you know that it's my sister who in the end finds me and leads me in this kind of really sacred, childlike screaming session in the backyard with please pops. But yeah, I've had a very complicated relationship with language since I was little. And I did speech therapy for a number of years and remained pretty shy and not incredibly verbal through high school, really. So it's been a long journey.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And when you were I think, eight, your hair turned grey as well because you were so anxious. You were such an anxious little thing.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Yes. Oh man. I tell people this and they're just, the disbelief, but yeah, I had grey hair from just such a young age and poor me because all I wanted was my own invisibility sadly and a little black girl sprouting grey hairs at such a age, it just everyone's eyes drawn to me. Even if they weren't, it certainly felt like it was because it's the things that are distinct about us that are our earliest alienators, you know? And so I had a lot of shame and alienation and anxiety that I was carrying in my body and the hair did not help.

Katherine May:
An old head on young shoulders literally.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Wow.

Katherine May:
Yeah. But at the same time, your family are incredible talkers and storytellers and they sound like an amazing bunch of people.. Just to read about them, you just want to be in their company. It just sounds like this lively household. And I mean, I was fascinated by your dad and I was fascinated by your grandmother, but I'd love to get you talking about your dad because I mean, it seems to me like he was a talker above all else. He was like a persuader and someone who could kind of coach you into endless acts of making yourself braver and better and bigger.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I mean, my father is so smooth. He's just smooth, smooth, smooth. He's not even the kind of smooth where you kind of sense that someone's maybe selling you something or you know, it's not quite like that. It's just, he has a way of making you feel so yourself, so comfortable with however you present to him. He can adapt. He can adapt to kind of speak your language and even speak your body language. And I grew up just watching him and watching this unapologetic kind of metamorphosis that just happened again and again and again, and I'd hear him answer the phone and it sounded like he had six different voices. And so he's, he's lovely. He's always been a hustler, a hustler since he was like a child working multiple jobs, shovelling sidewalks and cleaning the laundry facility and the evenings.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And so he's always had a bit of hustle in him, not a restful spirit by any means. And certainly not a reader. A lot of people kind of assume that I'm from a family of readers or yeah. My father will be the first person to tell you know, he's not a reader nor a writer. He doesn't quite have the patience for books. But I think because of who he is, he recognised that in me. And so he adapted our entire household into being this family of written words. And so he would bribe me and my siblings to write little poems or short stories or we could do that to get out of chores you know, if we didn't want to vacuum that day. Yes, I mean, brilliant. You know, because if you have a choice between wiping baseboards and writing a poem on the colour of yellow, you'll choose the poem probably. And so he found a way and that also brought my siblings into my form of expression.

Katherine May:
Right. It brought you together.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Exactly because they frankly didn't need it in the way that I did. They were all very verbal, very charismatic children and very comfortable and as comfortable as children can be in their own skin. And so my father very wisely kind of saw something distinct in me and was able to rework our family culture and our kind of household spirituality to look different.

Katherine May:
It's amazing. He comes across in your book as a incredibly smart, intuitive parent who was constantly working with you in the way that you wanted to work rather than straining against you. It's such a rare thing.

Cole Arthur Riley:
I do the older I get, the more I realized how rare it is to have a father that really takes you seriously. I always felt like he really took my emotion seriously even if he didn't understand them. There'd be times where I would just be crying and I wasn't able to articulate, or I don't think I even understood where the sadness was kind of coming from and I think it really tormented him in a way, but he always took it very seriously. It could have been a situation where when a child is unable to explain why they're sad, you kind of brush it away and say, okay, it must not be that serious. But yeah, to have an adult and a guardian who can really pay attention, I think is a gift.

Katherine May:
A huge gift. I love the story of you getting stuck halfway up a rock, like a climbing wall and please like you tell the story rather than me.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Okay. Yes. I mean, this is Arthur family lore. Like this is [crosstalk 00:20:28] Yes, exactly when everyone's going around the table. And everyone has a story, this is mine. So my father and my stepmom, they used to work at this, well, they volunteered at this annual rib cook off that would last about a week and my siblings and I thought they were very, very important because everyone knew who they were and they were kind of in charge of running the whole thing. And which in hindsight's a very big responsibility and says something about their hearts and their intuition. But so there are all kinds of activities at this thing.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And there's this giant rock wall to me, it felt giant at least. And I mean, when I tell you I was a scared child, I mean, I'm just a scared person. And I don't say that in a self deprecating way. I think fear can be really beautiful and sacred and I'm not ashamed of that, but I am a very scared person and my sister is quite brave. And so she drags me on this rock while I get halfway up it and I'm just sobbing. I feel like I cannot move. I cannot take, my legs are shaking. In my mind, this was the end, this was death. And you know I-

Katherine May:
You just stuck there forever, that was the end of it.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. And my little arms were shaking and my sister she goes up and down easy and she eventually has the worker call my parents on the walkie talkies. So my dad races over in the Gulf cart or whatever. And instead of coaching me from the ground, which would've been maybe the reasonable thing to do, he just straps, he harnesses in and gets on belay and he's up there. Next thing you know, he is next to me and he's like coaching me to the top, going reach and step and use your legs and not your arms and until we hit the buzzer and in my memory, at least whenever I hit that buzzer, just the crowd was just frenzy, but like joy and I mean, such a strong core memory of joy, I think, and of belonging and real pride in my body. I mean, we've talked about this a bit. I was really detached from my body as a child. I didn't know my body could do such a thing. And so I felt pride in my body as well as this connection, yeah.

Katherine May:
That's amazing. I have a very similar memory, which I think is why I relate to that story so much of going up a mountain with the girl guides and getting stuck at the top. Like just having that feeling of my legs, falling away underneath me and lying on the ground, like clinging to a rock.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Wow.

Katherine May:
And saying, that's it, I can't come down again. Like, I literally felt like the mountain could crumble underneath me and everything was going to fall down and I couldn't move. And I was walked down by an entire girl guy troop, like literally taking me one step at a time. And I know exactly how you felt in that moment. And there's sometimes being the fearful one, which I definitely always was, is a real privilege because you learn what it is for people to take care of you. And I don't think everyone learns that lesson until it's forced on them when they're older and they resent it. And there's something about being taken care of that's a real, it's an aspect of our humanity that we don't like to think about, but that it's an important one. It comes to all of us eventually.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Oh, I mean, I think that's beautifully said. So much humility, I think comes or is born out of fear. And I also think for people like us, the scared ones, I think there's a kind of intuition that is grown in us because maybe we're more attuned to those inner stirrings, more attuned than the person who maybe is very quick to want to triumph and conquer the fear. Very different than the sensation of wanting to win. I think the sensation of fear is more of a listening which I think lends itself really well to intuition as we age.

Katherine May:
Yeah, definitely. And in some ways I feel a little sorry for people who are so afraid of those moments. I get fearful of Heights and spiders and all kinds of things, but what I don't get afraid of is being afraid. Like that's okay for me. I don't mind being vulnerable and I'm really glad to have trust in being vulnerable because to me that is a life skill actually and a vital one.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I absolutely agree. I mean, I talk about this in This Here Flesh a bit, but I think fear can be such a protective force and it gets such a bad rap really. But if you think about it fear is the thing that keeps us from jumping from building to building, from putting our hand over the flame, there's this really protective force that I think that can be at the heart of it. When you talk about that being cared for, there's also a sense of being protected and kind of habitual realization that you are worthy of protection and worthy of that care and that nurturing, that I think comes out of those fear experiences.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Like, it's interesting to tell your dad's story in that context, because he had his own huge vulnerabilities as well as being this exceptionally mindful parent. He also had his kind of Achilles heel didn't he, which was addiction?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.

Katherine May:
And there comes a point in the book when you have to take care of him as well.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Oh, that's, it's true. There's a shift that happens. My father he lived with his addiction for a number of years in secret. He's very, very shrewd, very smart and aware of his own presence. And so he was able to kind of operate in a kind of hiding for quite some time. And there's so much to say about illusions and kind of how enchanting they are, especially as a child and there's something beautiful in that enchantment, but also something really devastating when a veil is lifted and you realise I'm not the only one afraid, and I'm not the only one who needs protected and care and kind of nurturing. And so it's really complicated to encounter that I think in our heroes and those who want to believe to be super human, but I think I started to love my father so much deeper when I recognised him as human. As human and there was something really painful, but also healing about that shift and how I viewed him.

Katherine May:
And I loved how compassionately you wrote about that. Like in other writer's hands that would've been a duh duh duh moment but actually as it turns out, my father was not who I thought he was, that kind of thing. And actually the way you describe it, it was just another aspect of this man that you found incredible and a vulnerability that he needed help with, and that doesn't diminish him in your eyes or our eyes as we read.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. And I'm just so relieved anytime someone says that's how they've read it because that was just something that really haunted me as I was writing, how do I really complicate someone's humanity and not have them be diminished to any one kind of story or diminished to kind of plot, a narrative-

Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Actually complicated so that there's many kind of tensions and releases and this is significant and I don't want to diminish that, but I also don't want my father's story to just be eclipsed. And so I took extra care, I think in those early chapters, the first half of the book to really help people fall in love with my father and my grandmother, how I fell in love with them and I'm in love with them. And so that by the time they come to the basement, by the time they arrived to the realization, it's not this unmasking, it's kind of more so like turning a leaf over in your hand and you're seeing a different part, your privilege to more.

Katherine May:
Yeah, it's a deepening and a very human story about a family who didn't always know how to love themselves and who have existed in a world that's been incredibly hostile to them and how we cope actually, how we get through.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah and as I wrote, I noticed so much overlap in my father story, my grandma story and my story in terms of hiding as a form of coping and dislocation, this kind of solitariness as a coping and that I was really eyeopening to encounter myself in my father, in my father's story. And I'd always thought of us as so different because he's so charming and like we talked about, he's this kind of character, this lovely character. And when I wrote, I realized the distance between us as really not that great.

Katherine May:
And I feel like that informs the way you talk about God, as you conceive of them as this charismatic figure who is with you in your weakest, degraded, difficult moments rather than is judging you, like who's walking alongside you.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Yeah. You know, I try to, I'm just trying to become more honest about what I really think about the divine and the truth is I really do think about God as this familial, this kind of tender familial existence maybe, and kind of embodying these different aspects of a family, certainly not a nuclear family necessarily. But I think about God as a mother, I think about God as a child. And, and so I wanted to express that and I've never really resonated with a very formal and demanding God.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Well I-

Katherine May:
And it just seems to me that lots of people use that God to tell people off for stuff that they themselves don't approve of, that God is like a talk kit that you throw at people you don't like, I mean.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Exactly, exactly. As opposed to a way of making sense of who you are and how you move in the world and what your relationship to other people. There is a way I think to experience God as kind of a lens, the divine as a lens to help you see the world and see yourself clearly, see the barn swallows in the backyard clearly. I think there's a way to experience the divine that's like that as opposed to this instruction manual and-

Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right and wrong, like a really fixed sense of right and wrong that isn't in any way, contingent on what's coming up for you at the moment and what you're having to deal with.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Exactly. Exactly.

Katherine May:
I'm just interrupting you for a moment to ask if you'd consider subscribing to my Patreon. Friends of The Wintering Sessions, get an extended edition of the podcast a day early, the chance to put questions to my guests, a monthly bonus episode and exclusive discounts on my courses and events. Most of all, you help to keep the podcast running. To find out more, go to patreon.com/katherinemay. Do take a look. Now back to the show.

Katherine May:
So I want to hear about your grandma too. I'm always telling stories about my grandma and they are irresistible people, grandmas.

Cole Arthur Riley:
They are.

Katherine May:
She sounds remarkable. I mean, what she endured and what she was able to become is a story in itself, isn't it?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to really think about the things that she's lived through. I was just talking to my sister about this the other day, the just trajectory of her life and then marking the trajectory of American history alongside that life. And whew, she's been through a lot, in many ways. She went to live with people who weren't her parents at a very young age because her mom was having struggles with her mental health and was in a hospital for a long time. And ultimately the family decided her mother couldn't raise her. So she went to live on this village, she went from Manhattan, Harlem the city to this very rural farm area with people who were quite cruel and cruel in the name of God actually, if we want to talk about using God as like this manual.

Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And really verbally abusive in every way you can imagine and had to make sense of herself and make sense of who she wanted God to be in that climate. And eventually she leaves and is kind of freed from that, but it took a toll and I mean, as her granddaughter, you want to believe that you completely kind of transcend these difficult things. And by the time you're 70, I don't know the language you've conquered them maybe and to see them so clearly in her. As her granddaughter to see these things, this abuse that had left its mark on her, sleeping with the door open, sleeping in a chair and never a bed. There's so much tragedy that I thought was just who she is as a person.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And as I got older and learned more of her story, I realized we're born out of a lot of trauma. But in ways she did, she did experience a kind of liberation. She created this family. We called her the queen matriarch and we would always, we'd, say this thing, like protect the matriarch at all costs. And she created this family of real love and not perfection but of love and our own kind of spirituality. It wasn't necessarily overtly Christian or we didn't grow up church or anything like that or reading the Bible but there was a sense in the family that she created that our humanity matters and how we relate to ourselves and our interior worlds, that matters. And so out of her own formation, the fact that she was able to then form this sacred community of love and tenderness is so, so special.

Katherine May:
And she shared, I mean, you came to share her history yourself. Like again, it's the same as your dad in a way, like she had this ability to be vulnerable with you and to be human with you and to allow that exchange almost, which I don't think everybody has with their grandparents to put it lightly.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I mean, I'm not sure. So I started interviewing people on my family a handful of years ago. Elders and trying to preserve their stories and their memories. I was kind of plagued by this thought of, this lack of artifacts in my family history. And so anyways, I started out on this personal project just to collect stories. And I would say it wasn't truly until then that I think to really let me in, it was almost like she needed a reason and she needed an invitation so that it didn't feel like a burden, which is quite sad, but as it happened, as I began interviewing her and when I decided that her stories would be in the book and she agreed to that, I would talk to her Saturdays and just ask her a question after question, and this intimacy was born. And I really don't think I would've ever told her about my own abuse as a child. And I don't think I ever would've had that with her, had it not been for that ritual of story telling and that kind of weekly nearness.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And so, yeah I'm really grateful for how that shows up in the book. It was a very last minute addition, I'm talking last minute edit, and I did it because-

Katherine May:
Yeah. It's one of those bravery moments in writing.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. That can be an editor's nightmare, but I just knew in order for ... There was so much unsaid and there still is that I think there's kind of a beautiful withholding that I was trying to practice, but at the same time, I knew that there were just a few things I needed to say so that people would truly understand why it's our stories being told in this true, I mean, this connection that wouldn't make sense.

Katherine May:
Why it's so shared and the power of that sharing and that shared burden and how you can integrate all of those shameful things that you feel so terrible about which you shouldn't feel shameful, but you do by having a shared story. And it seems to me in your book that what you're saying is that those stories flow in both directions. It's not just about you inheriting your family's stories, but you're sharing them back to them and there's a kind of melding that happens there.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes, absolutely. And there's this moment that I share in the book. So my grandmother, she actually passed away during the editing phase of the book during the final edits, in fact. And so there's this story I tell where I visit her in the hospital. She had fibrosis of the lung and was having trouble breathing. And she had just come out of medically induced coma, which if anyone knows anything of that, it takes a lot of your capacities away, it takes time to recover your speech and your fine motor movements and all kinds of things.

Cole Arthur Riley:
So anyways, I'm sitting on her bed and she's just talking and telling stories, but she's still just a bit out of it and so she's using we and I, and you, and they, and like her, it's all kind of jumbled. And I truly, because of so much overlap in our story, I wouldn't know, there were times I didn't know if she was talking about my story or hers and I just rested in that. There was something about the moment that I thought this doesn't need clarification, I'm just going to let her tell it and I mean-

Katherine May:
And she says, we did good, doesn't she? We did good.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes, she was such a poet. She said, we did good. We took the sweetest part of the fruit and we cut it off. That's what she said.

Katherine May:
It's incredible.

Cole Arthur Riley:
We took the sweetest part of the fruit and we cut it off.

Katherine May:
And I'd love you to make the link for us towards like, your work is about the sort of the huge burden of black history that rests or black American history in particular that rests on you as this latest generation and how you come to carry that as the air to this huge kind of terrible story that hangs over you as a member of a wider community.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I mean, it would be so hard to tell our family's story without telling a story of blackness. Not that our generational story can encapsulate it, but I just wouldn't be telling a true story. And yeah so I do go there in my work with Black Liturgies and in This Here Flesh. I wanted to get out of kind of spirituality that didn't come at the expense of my blackness. I have belonged to spiritual spaces that kind of demanded that I leave my blackness at the door, so to speak in order to enter this larger community and it was really painful and damaging. So in This Here Flesh, I'm really protective of that. I'm really protective of maybe the unique ways, the particular ways that my family has come to understand the spiritual, not in spite of blackness, but because of it, you know, what are our rituals? Also what are our coping habits but what are our rituals? What are our loves? What are our desires?

Cole Arthur Riley:
All of those things that are so informed by our blackness, they have room in the conversation as opposed to being kind of pushed down. I try to let it breathe.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And you say a lot there about there's a moment when your Bible teacher says to you God's in your heart and you rebel against that. You're like, no, I don't want God there. I want God, like at the corner of the street, kind of. I want that presence in my everyday life as I live it rather than in some kind of idealised future space in which I am perfect.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. This kind of immaterial, vague language of the heart. It's very white evangelical that language. And I don't think that people who use it always understand what they sound like to other people. I think there's nothing wrong with having your particular-ised language, but when you're completely unaware that your language doesn't translate to an outsider I think it says a lot about your spiritual practice. But I was in college when I first started hearing again, and again, all this language about inviting Jesus into your heart and it all felt very imprecise and very immaterial to me in a way I felt like I had to leave my body behind. It felt like there was a complete disregard for the flesh, for my embodied existence. She wasn't talking about my physical heart, certainly not. She was talking about-

Katherine May:
Not even the actual beating your heart is allowed.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Exactly. And I don't blame her. She was maybe 21 herself and ascribing to these things that we say and these beliefs that we say that we believe, but we're not actually sure. We're not actually convinced we believe them. I think she just like I and I certainly didn't have the confidence to say it out loud, all of those doubts and all of that resistance in me. It was an inner resistance, but the temptation of belonging is so large. It looms so large that you'll say you believe anything to belong. I mean, I truly believe that that is such a huge factor in what we say we believe, or don't believe, it comes down so often to belonging. And so what does it mean to create spaces, spiritual spaces where your belonging does is not predicated on what you believe, about on what you think about any given thing. What does it look like to create spiritual spaces that you can wake up one day and think an entirely different thing about God and you're no less?

Katherine May:
And there's something that you say right at the beginning of the book that struck me so hard, which I'd been thinking about a lot, because as you might know, I've written about my autism diagnosis, which was like five years ago now. And that for me was a moment when I thought a bit like you about having been a quiet person all my life, who hasn't been allowed to be quiet and how I needed to retreat from the world. But during the pandemic, I kind of came to the end of a cycle of that and realised that even I could get lonely and that actually my creative life doesn't exist in a vacuum. And you write so beautifully at the beginning about how like white, religious thinking has often told you that silence and retreat and isolation are where you enter into spiritual communion. But that actually, you say to quote you, I cannot sustain belief on my own and I'm learning that sometimes the most sacred thing to do is to shout. That spirituality exists within community and I think we can use that interchangeably with creativity there maybe.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Yeah. I think that's beautiful. And to allow that for yourself too, I mean, I used to think that solitude and silence were just the pinnacle, the complete pinnacle of spiritual wisdom. And I mean, I do still find spiritual wisdom in them, but I'd completely kind of constricted my spiritual experience to those things. And I think if it's only silence, I have a very complicated ... We've talked about my childhood, I have a very complicated relationship with silence from my childhood. I have a very complicated relationship with silence as a black woman in America and being silenced-

Katherine May:
Yeah, being silenced, yeah.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Exactly. And so there's a real complicated relationship that I feel I must acknowledge and I have to allow for a diversity of things. I need to kind of silence that isn't done to me or that isn't impressed upon me, but that's chosen and I need a kind of solitude that is only coming because I feel deeply grounded in a community and people who love me and understand me and can pull me back in or else my solitude becomes just a practice and dislocation. And so I'm starting to realise all of these things about my contemplative practice and trying to expand how I think about them.

Katherine May:
Funny enough, I've got quite an angry passage in my new book about the way that silence and the tradition of men going off in a kind of monastic way to contemplate and therefore claiming the spiritual high ground because they've thought about this stuff harder. It's like a well way of systematically excluding most women who are busy with these mundane duties of caring, like whatever generation you're caring for, we are always looking after somebody and how that's been weaponised against us and how I weaponised it against myself after I have my son and I couldn't keep up with my life, very rigid meditation practice that I'd made for myself that only allowed, had to be twice a day. It had to be after breakfast, but before I started ... oh, sorry. Before breakfast, but like, blah, blah, blah, it went on and on, like, it was really rigid.

Katherine May:
And for ages, I felt like I couldn't therefore access this and actually it's only really recently that I've come to realize that I have to remake it for myself and that those people could learn a lot from me actually. There are depth of experience that they haven't reached if they've never looked after anyone and have only been looked after.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes, yes. We could talk about this for hours because I completely agree just the level of the sheer privilege and just being able to extract oneself and go off. Maybe they've thought about a thing more, but you've lived it, you're living it, you're feeling it hopefully. And I think the way that I'll say white intellectualism has situated itself in the world and white male intellectualism has situated itself in the world is that, the thinking, that's the top of the hierarchy. That's the most important thing.

Katherine May:
And everyone else must rally to facilitate that thinking for them.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Yes, exactly. And you have to prove yourself. You have to prove yourself as thoughtful, you have to prove that you can think well about being kind before you-

Katherine May:
Go out and do that.

Cole Arthur Riley:
... show that you're being kind, that you are kind, you're expected to articulate something meaningful about kindness, more than you're expected to operate in the world in a kind way. I think it's really tricky. And there's a Audrey Lord quote that I'll probably butcher a bit, but she said-

Katherine May:
That's okay, I do that with the time on here.

Cole Arthur Riley:
To paraphrase, she said something like the white fathers told us, I think therefore I am and the black mother tells us, I feel therefore I can be free. And I think it really is. I think you can adapt that in so many ways, apart from just feeling, but there's something about the life of a woman about the life of most women and most socio economically neglected and oppressed people that has demanded a being, has demanded a doing that is really valid in terms of how you are spiritually formed and encounter the spiritual so much to learn. I think about this as well with children, the wisdom of children and before they're able to even articulate what they know, the things that they know and that they're paying attention to.

Katherine May:
And the questions they ask as well, the things they know how to seek that we so often tell them like, or we kind of squash that down a bit and diminish it and say, "Oh, no, no, no, don't think about that." But it actually like giving them the space to think about those things is what we should completely be doing.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Yes. I mean children, like you said, the questions and there's this confidence that you have to have to ask a question, this kind of sacred confidence that you've been able to find something, you've been able to find the unknowing in you, and then say you desire something, or you're curious. I think there's so much courage and the curiosity of children and so much brilliance and how they operate in the world and with nature and how they play, that we have so much to learn from. But when we're trapped in these concepts of thought and the cognitive project to being the most important, one when we're trapped in that, I think we lose sight of all of these other forms of wisdom that are in our presence.

Katherine May:
Well, I feel like I'm very much a learner on that scale. I feel like I've been very devoted to my kind of cognitive development all my life. And I'm gradually learning to be more embodied and to seek different ways of knowing. And it doesn't come easy to me. I won't lie, but I totally see the value in it. And I'm just full of admiration for people who do move through the world as a OD, rather than a little kind of mind cloud floating above this useless fleshing casement. That's how I've often thought about my fleshing casement, anyway.

Katherine May:
I could talk to you forever and I wish we could. I'd like to just ask you about one final thing so that I don't take over your entire life. It's tempting though. But recently you've written in the Atlantic, I think about a different relationship with silence and about staying quiet sometimes and sometimes not feeling obliged to speak about everything. Could you talk a bit about that because I, again, kind of strongly related to what you were saying there?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. So before I began Black Liturgies, I didn't have too much of a social media presence. I mean, I didn't have Twitter, I didn't understand the culture and all the ways kind of all the pressures of it. I was extremely naive about it, I only followed like friends and family and not these brilliant thinkers or news anchors or people like that. So it all felt very new to me and I will have people, when something tragic happens or something tragic is trending, well meaning people message me and ask me, "Are you going to write about this? Why haven't you said anything about this?" I think because I was so new to the experience, I was maybe able to become more critical of what was happening to me so I was thinking how strange, like this wouldn't be asked of me in person. If I was having coffee with someone, and at the end they didn't-

Katherine May:
Do you think it's about this? Can you perform to me on this?

Cole Arthur Riley:
Surely no one would criticise me, but there is this real cultural, current, and this formation really that is telling us that when something bad happens, that we must comment on it. I personally think the summer of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain. And I could go on. Something about that moment, I think, maybe tip the scales or did something to where if you didn't comment on a thing, it meant that you did that thing, you're just as guilty as the hand that pulled the trigger.

Katherine May:
Yeah, that you're somehow culpable of, yeah.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And I think that really did some damage to everyone's psyche and to everyone's demand that requires the demand we place on ourselves to have something articulate or meaningful to say in response to the war in the invasion of Ukraine. In that Atlantic article, I say, on February 23rd, I couldn't have pointed out Ukraine on a map and I'm expected to craft some meaningful statement, which really would be, if I'm honest, it would've been a work of theater, it would've been theatrical because I knew so little and I knew I needed to read and I knew that there were other voices, in fact, that would it be much more appropriate voices who know more. It'd be much more appropriate to allow them to kind of have the air or at least for a little while, but it was the next day and people were asking me to comment.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And so I'm very suspicious of this. I'm not so suspicious that I think there's something wrong in commenting certainly if you feel drawn to, or you feel like you have something that you need to process, or I think that's beautiful and good, but what if you don't and is that okay? And I think silence, I think silence does something. It allows you to really become honest. I say to hope the theatre and to ask yourself, or hear rather to listen to, are you angry? Are you sad? Do you feel nothing? Silence, that's where I can be honest and say, I feel nothing. And I want to feel something. I think silence can do so many things and we've taken, I've done this, I'm guilty of this, the words of very brilliant black ancestors, we've taken them so far to heart about silence and we really oppress people throughout history.

Cole Arthur Riley:
I've made really beautiful remarks on the violence of silence. We've talked about this some here, but I think what does it mean to nuance that, and I think that's been my journey a little bit, this silent little girl, this restricted girl, then becoming this kind of in resistance to the violence and the oppressive form of silence and wanting to really live in my own voice. And then also coming to reacquaint myself in, is there something beautiful in it? Is there something that I'm able to hear in silence that I would otherwise be completely unaware of? And I think the answer is, yes.

Katherine May:
Well, it seems to me that what's so obvious is that little girl who was choosing not to talk was listening and watching and understanding in a way that other people were not, that there is right now, like you are the embodiment of the value of sometimes just choosing silence in a positive way.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I do think it's possible and I think we have a lot to learn from people who are able to practice it when they're under great pressure. I think we have a lot to learn from that kind of silence and the rest of just pacing around the perimeter of my house and in silence, like what kind of formation that offers me, that allows me to then meet the tragedies of the world. Not from a state of an impoverished spirit, but one that's kind of awake and alive and not just concerned with the sound of my own voice.

Katherine May:
I just think that's such wisdom for our age and like, I've been gradually reversing out of Twitter, having been there right from the start actually and loved as somebody who felt very isolated in the world and very different to everyone else without understanding why. There was a time when I was so grateful to flow into that space and find other voices like mine and I can't even explain to you the release of that actually to be understood, truly understood, like for what I was. And then there came a phase when I felt overwhelmed by it, but also that I was taking part in an important act of witnessing that it had put me in contact with many, many scratchy truths of the world that were uncomfortable to see, but that I understood life on a more micro level.

Katherine May:
Twitter is just full of voices calling out to be heard. And I think it's a really mixed blessing to be able to hear them. And it's the first time in history we've been able to do it and it's changed us. It's changed us for the better. But there is also this pressure to go in and perform anger every day. Like at completely outrageous things, don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't think those things are worthy of anger because they're awful and infuriating, but I am not living a good life if I'm just going out and spouting range in every direction every single day and being taken up by that, like it's useless to me and I'm useless to the world through that fury that just generates itself.

Katherine May:
It's like this big Inferno, and as soon as you are not angry, everybody's angry with you, which I think is what you were, you were saying. And so I'm stepping away and I've got mixed feelings about that because I do think that some of the things it's thrown in my path have been good for me to be rattled by that unsettled feeling that it often gives me is right. I should feel unsettled by those things going on.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I feel we have similar feelings about Twitter. Everyone criticises Instagram, and I find Twitter just so painful. I made the mistake of scrolling through Twitter just before we had our conversation and I was on my laptop. I thought, why am I doing this? It came across this horrible, this very sad video. And the kind of ripping in and out of these kind of tragic moments. You're scrolling, that kind of, it's a real emotional labor to kind of pull yourself into the tragedy of Afghanistan and the little girls not being able to return to school. And then I scroll and I see Kim Kardashian and Kanye west and the next post is about face cream and it's then the next post is about losing another black person. It's a real emotional tag that I think we haven't been able to adapt to yet. I don't know if we ever will.

Katherine May:
I don't know if we have the equipment. I don't know if we've got the brain structure to deal with, as you say, like desiring face cream and believing that it will solve your problems next to the death of a child and a political injustice, and then a hilarious bit of gossip. Like, I don't know if I've got the capacity for that, honestly.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I don't know if I want to you're right. Like, do I want to have the capacity for that kind of transition and what is that doing to me? And so I mean I've had to find ways and it sounds like you're figuring this out as well, or doing-

Katherine May:
Very much in that process of, yeah.

Cole Arthur Riley:
I'm trying to find ways to kind of set up these boundaries in my life, because I'm really concerned about how I'm being formed as a public presence on these apps, as a human on these apps. I went and got a dumb phone shortly after starting Black Liturgies. I got rid of my smartphone, because I just felt like so much was changing about me so quickly that I thought I would be immune to. You think once you know the threat, you're immune to it, but these structures, these systems are very smart. So anyways, I go on Twitter on my laptop, which creates a bit of distance as opposed to carrying it with me. There's kind a silence throughout my day. I know that it's a very privileged thing to be able to have a dumb phone. I don't think that's really practical for my most people. I live in a very small town. I don't need directions often. So I mean, it's been so wonderful and so healing for me to not be carrying around the noise of the world with me, all day long to carry that heavy-

Katherine May:
All the world's pain in your pocket.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Right. Yeah. Right.

Katherine May:
It's heavy. Oh Cole, thank you so much. It was just the most wonderful conversation. And I-

Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.

Katherine May:
I mean, I love where we've got to, because I'm now about to say to everyone that they should find you online.

Cole Arthur Riley:
And here we are.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And that just neatly encapsulates where we are because we are going out and we are looking for wise minds like yours and we are trolling through a whole lot of other stuff in between, but I just thank you so much for your wonderful book, which I'd recommend to anyone This Here Flesh and for this brilliant conversation today.

Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you. And thanks for inviting me into your space and trusting me with your listeners.

Katherine May:
Oh my goodness, always.

Katherine May:
I am standing next to the most magnificent herring gull. I know you're technically supposed to hate herring gulls if you live by the sea. They are the sea goals that come and aggressively still all your chips. But I think they're magnificent birds. They take three years to mature and so you can tell roughly how old a herring gull is when it's under three. This one is a year two juvenile. The first year are kind of big and puffy and speckled. And then the second year they're still speckled, but their wings are blacker and they just look a bit skinnier and leaner. By the third year, they'll have their incredible pristine white feathers that always look so neat and tidy but always calls them nosebleed goals because they have a little red spot on their beak that looks like their nose is bleeding. It's quite a good way to identify them actually.

Katherine May:
Anyway, this gull who is a couple of metres away from me and looking me dead in the eye in a challenging way, he's only got one leg, but he's styling it out. He's landed on one of the groin posts. He's standing there looking for all the world like he could come and take my chips if I had any. I wouldn't fancy my chances against him.

Katherine May:
It's part of the amazing stuff that you could notice in this world. It's always there waiting for you. I just love the way Cole Arthur Riley talks about that big heady mix of suffering and life's challenges and the weight of history and political anger myth with wonder and awe and all those simple emotions that we are longing to feel and how we contain it rather than anything external to us. If you haven't read This Here Flesh, don't be put off if you're not a reader of spiritual book, seriously, challenge yourself, give it a go, park your cynicism, park your skepticism and just immerse yourself in her beautiful writing. I just love her prose and I love the way she made me see the world we live in for a little while. I can't give you any stronger recommendation than that. Read it, read it, read it, read it. It's a beautiful cover too, if that helps. I like a good cover.

Katherine May:
I'm going to head home and cook everyone dinner in a minute, but I just wanted to thank you for being here. I feel kind of good about the world at the moment. While I feel bad about the actual world, the world is full of dreadful, dreadful stuff but I kind of always notice in these moments when we are all despairing, that amazing compassionate quality of our despair and it gives me hope every time. I can't help it, I'm an optimist. I always admire the way we survive and take care of each other, even when we're urged not to. And even when we are told it's silly and that we should look away and that it's not our responsibility, we reach out. I just love that about us. We can't stop and we shouldn't ever.

Katherine May:
So I need to say thank you to everyone who helps making this podcast to the producer Buddy Peace who composes the music and Meghan Hutchins, who we've been trying to find a title for because Meghan is my virtual assistant. She puts so much in place in my world and just helps me endlessly to cope. But she has such a pivotal role in this podcast. She looks after all the guests, she makes sure they're really well informed, that they're looked after that they know where they should be, fills in big gaps that I leave there. And she makes sure that me and Buddy are well coordinated and motivated and that we know what we are doing.

Katherine May:
And so we have recently entered into the British Podcast Awards. I'm telling you that as an act of vulnerability, because as I don't suppose we'll even get listed. We're competing against much bigger podcasts, but I wanted to put us in there because I'm really proud of what we do and I know there's loads of you who love this podcast and I love that you love it. And I love making it anyway. Had to put a title for Meghan. And we've decided that she is the podcast's convener, which maybe isn't perfect, but I love that there's a role there for someone who is helping everyone to gather, helping everyone to get together. It's kind of a soft, gentle thing that she does, but she does it so well. Anyway, that's my tribute to Meghan today.

Katherine May:
I'm very lucky to have the team behind me that I have, and she helps me to manage my brilliant Patreon community who this month, as a special, are getting a reading clinic. I'm going to do my best to help everyone to understand how to get their reading mojo back or where to find that elusive next book, when you're a bit stuck. I've been really stuck with my reading for a long time and I'm just coming out of it again. And I'm feeling that urge to rush through loads of books now to kind of eat them whole and I want to help other people back. So if you're not a member of the Patreon community, consider joining. Come and talk to us. We're really friendly. It's really lovely. I've got some interesting plans for the future there too. Watch this space. Thank you all for listening. Thank you Cole for a brilliant conversation and I'll see you next time. Bye.

Show Notes

This week Katherine chats to writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies. Unable to speak up as a child, Cole talks about how she learned to find her voice amid a family of gifted talkers and storytellers. Cole describes her father and grandmother as inspirational figures who nevertheless were marked by the generational trauma experienced by so many African Americans. But from this emerges Cole’s own, unique spiritual account of the world, overseen by a God who lives in our hurting, imperfect bodies, and who sees us as we are.

Cole is one of the most lyrical, perceptive and moving writers of her generation, at once cerebral and earthly, and always rooted in the body. We talk about Cole’s hair turning grey as a child, her wise grandmother and inspirational father, and the moments when she came to realise that both of them needed her care.

We talk about:

Childhood anxiety disorders and selective mutism
How inspirational parents can nurture confidence
Generational trauma, including abuse
Addiction in the family
How silence isn’t the only route to spiritual insight

Links from this episode:

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