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Welcome to the New Books Network
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B
hello everyone. Welcome to this Is the Place, a podcast series from the Common magazine on the New Books Network. The Common publishes literature and art with a modern sense of place. I'm Emily Everett, managing editor of the magazine and host of the Channel. Today we'll be talking to Rose Gilton about her essay Now's Boutique, which appears in issue 31 of the Common. Rose Gilton is a writer and gardener from Scotland. She is currently working on her first book, Easement, a memoir about mental health, queer parenting, and radical acts of gardening. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review, Wax Wing, New Ohio Review, and Ecotone. Previously a reporter in West Africa and a member of an ocean going rescue crew, she now lives and gardens on the Isle of Maul. Bro Skelton, thanks for joining us.
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Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
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B
Would you just give us a sense of place for our conversation? Describe where you're calling from.
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Yeah, I'm calling from I'm in Tobermory, which is the main town on the Isle of Mull, which is a large and lightly populated island off the west coast of Scotland. It's about 100 miles northwest of North Glasgow and it's very sunny today, which is nice.
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B
Oh wow, very nice. It is also very sunny here in Western Mass and not at all lightly populated here. I would love to start out with a reading from your essay. Would you just read those first few paragraphs for us?
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Sure, I'd love to. Now's Boutique the first apartment that I lived in in Dhaka, was brand new and backed onto the far end of the airport Runway so that from my bedroom window I had a distant view of the ocean and of a vast baobab tree silhouetted against the hazy Saharan sky. The neighborhood, modest two story family homes and the occasional new building like mine, was as far out of town as taxis would go, and even then they would refuse to take me the whole way, grumbling as they dropped me at the entrance to the neighborhood so that I had to walk the rest of the way to my apartment along a potholed sandy road. From my apartment's narrow balcony I could see a turquoise metal cabin, what was called a boutique, with a roof made from jumbled sections of corrugated metal and a hatch propped open to the street. The boutique measured six feet wide and the same deep and sold items piecemeal teaspoons of Nescafe, single segments of baguette, individual sachets of laundry detergent. After I had been living in the apartment for about a month. I slipped on my flip flops and walked down the sandy street to the cabin, where a tall man about my age, 24, greeted me with a wild and impish smile. Bonsoir, Sorgh Nancy, he said in a mix of French and Wolof, and I noticed that along with giving me a formal greeting of respect as a sokhna, a noble lady, he also wore a smart press shirt and trousers with a crease down the middle. Even his leather shoes, which I knew to be second hand because back then only the rich who traveled to France or America had access to such new things, were polished. Salaam alaikum, I replied. Ludeka bi wach. I had learned obscure Wolof phrases like this one, literally what is the neighborhood saying? By interviewing rappers and haggling with taxi drivers. But often when I deployed them, people were so excited by me, a foreigner speaking their language, that they would switch to French, ask me where I learned Wolof, where I was from, and wondering if I was married. But this man at the boutique, whose name I discovered was now, didn't flinch. I bought one cigarette from him and then leaned into the cabin so that he could light it, his long, slender fingers striking the wheel in the cool evening air. We stood for a while and talked about Kazamas, a region in the south of the country bordering Guinea Bissau to the south and the Gambia to the north, where he was from and where I had lived for a while before coming to Dhaka. I attempted to assess what was different about this man. He spoke with a formality that matched his smart attire, but seemed at odds both with how I was usually treated as a single white woman, especially one who smoked, and with the surroundings in which we found ourselves, a makeshift cabin in a not yet finished neighborhood on a road that in the dry season coated everything and everyone in dust and in the rainy season was sludge now was young, his face was unlined, his teeth were cared for, but he didn't wear the kind of clothes other young Senegalese men who weren't from backgrounds of means tended to wear, second hand Nike tees or shirts with obscure logos and slogans that had traveled thousands of miles to the conservative Muslim surroundings in which they had ended up now asked me questions about my work, where I was from, and who my friends were. That showed a curiosity for me that I felt completely novel, having often been treated by strangers as an exotic and crucially unmarried creature from another planet. As I smoked and he leaned against the cabin hatch, I got the sense that a hard life had not destroyed his sense of joy. To my great relief, he wasn't in the least bit flirtatious. Over the weeks that followed, I went every evening to sit on the wooden bench beside Nao's Boutique to smoke my nightly cigarette.
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B
Thank you so much for reading that. I wonder, for our listeners who haven't read this piece yet, would you just describe or sort of summarize what it's about?
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It's about a friendship with a man now who's. Who I've been friends with for 20, 20 years. And it's. It's an essay that looks back at our relationship, how it started and how it progressed when I met my now wife, then girlfriend. And there came a moment where I had to decide whether I was going to risk telling him because he comes from a very conservative Muslim country where I was surrounded by a lot of homophobia at that time, or let the friendship kind of fizzle away. I knew that there was going to be a huge risk in telling him, but actually in not telling him, that would be the end of the relationship because I couldn't continue to emit this huge piece of information. So it looks back at that relationship kind of through that time, and so where we found ourselves now, or where we find ourselves as friends now. And also thinking about that time of my life when I lived in this sort of precarious situation. Yeah. In my early 20s with him as my neighbor.
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B
Yeah. It's really just a lovely, heartwarming piece, but doesn't sort of, you know, veer away from. From some, you know, tough, tough moments and tough ideas. Yeah. I'm so curious what inspired you to start work on this piece and how the first draft came together, because, I mean, it sounds like, you know, you've been in this friendship for decades now. Like, what brought this piece to sort of bear on it?
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A
Yeah, it's a good question. So I lived in Senegal for 15 or so years as a journalist, and I've never written anything about my life there. And people would always ask me about it or ask me why I haven't written anything. And I just felt that, you know, it was 15 years of my life. I was 35 when I left, so it was, you know, it was quarter of my life. It wasn't like I went somewhere for two weeks and. And then I could write about it. Right. It was a huge part of my life, and I felt that there wasn't really. There wasn't like a single thing I could write about. And so I. I just sort of, sort of have put that part of my life, kind of away in a box. And. But of course, I, you know, I talk with now very often and other friends from Senegal. And then a few a year ago, I had a work trip there, and I went back without my wife and son, and now actually wasn't there because he's living in the south. He's living back in Casamance now. But I went back to. I had a day off. So I went back to the apartment building where I had lived and saw that the garden that now and I had created, which is also what the essay is about, had been bulldozed, and there were cars parked there. And so I just started writing about the garden. Actually, it was the garden that kind of led me in to writing about the friendship. And, yeah, I think I set out to write, really about the garden. And then it took me into this kind of other place, thinking about what that garden meant to me. And, of course, about now, who had created the garden with me.
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B
I know that you worked on some fairly minor revisions with our nonfiction editor, Liz Witte, and probably you did many hefty revisions before you even submitted on your own. So I'm wondering if you can tell us anything about the sort of revisions you were thinking about. And also just, I don't know if you have sort of revision strategies that you use for every piece or specifically for this piece.
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A
Well, I'll say I'm a very slow writer. It takes me many years to write an essay and get it to the point that I want to show it to anyone outside of my wife who's also a writer or close friends in my writing group. And this essay, I actually wrote it on my phone. First of all, I started writing it as an Instagram post because I had taken a photo of the space where the garden used to be. And then I realized that I'd reached my word limit. So then I made it into. I think I made it into a substack post. I have a substack about composting. And so I wrote about that as this had been a garden where we had done composting. So, yeah, after I made it into a substack post, I decided that it was quite a good essay. And so I wrote it as just an essay. And it was very short and quite the whole thing, I think, only took me about three months, which is extraordinarily quick for me. And then I showed it to my writing group, and then I sent it to a friend who I did my MFA with, who's a fiction writer. And Playwright. And she gave me some really good feedback and I was able to do. Yeah, I guess the whole sort of. I did a few drafts, perhaps over another six month period, which, like I say, is very quick for me. And then that was it, really. I kind of. I gave it to my wife and she cried. So if I can make her cry with a piece of writing, then I know that it's working structurally well because there's enough, you know, there's enough pressure in the right places. So. Yeah, so. And then I sent it to you.
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B
That's beautiful. Yeah.
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I always find.
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B
I find writing essays so hard because I just kind of like dump everything on the page from my life. You know, all these experiences, all these anecdotes and stuff. And then it can be hard to sort of. Yeah. Sort them out and arrange them and make sure you have the structure like you say.
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A
Yeah. I mean, I think this was. This was a nice. This was very easily structurable because it was about a garden in a place at a time of my life. So I think there were a few times when I went off on a tangent. But then, you know, then I thought, oh, I'm going to write about every friendship I had in Senegal, you know, which was like, silly because it wasn't about every friendship. You know, it was about this one particular friendship. And then I. I kept reminding myself every day when I sat down to write that this was about this garden. And so to bring it back to the garden and kind of the. The sort of tentacles that come out. The emotional tentacles that come out from the garden. So in that sense, it was very easy to keep it kind of, you know, sort of defined within a certain time of my life.
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B
Yeah, I think that that's very smart and very successful. One of my favorite aspects of the story is this incredible community feel that surrounds Now's boutique. It's really a place where people who are maybe a little bit on the margins come to be together at the boutique. And in particular, I love this line you had. And I'll just read it. Comparing myself to the established reporters. I knew my life felt precarious and scruffy. At Now's Boutique, I had another life, one where being precarious and scruffy was the norm. I love that so much. Can you talk about kind of getting all that community on the page? It sounds like maybe you were like hemming and hawing about whether you were going to include more of these relationships, but it really does have this sort of like group. Group feel, those moments.
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A
Yeah. I, I mean, this was a long time ago, you know, so I had to really, like, I had to really think hard to try and remember people's names. But I lived in that apartment for, would say like two years. And you know, at, I think Dakar has changed. You know, it's become a huge city, you know, very kind of metropolitan built up area. But I think, and this, it remains, you know, to the, to when I was, I was last there a year ago and it still felt like this, but I think it less so than it had in sort of 2005, which was when I had first lived there. This kind of sense of people living on the street. So because it's hot in your house and you need furniture in your house and people often don't have furniture or there's lots of people living in the house or there's no privacy. And so there's this, there's a real street life that happens. And I, you know, I lived alone, I was single. I had a very stressful sort of patchwork of jobs at that time. And I was, you know, I was trying to like, make my way in a place where, you know, I was speaking to other languages before, you know, my own language. And I was struggling with that or it was just, you know, it was a, it was a lot on my system and I had friendships, but they were often friendships that, you know, some I still have to this day, friendships with other people in my kind of situation. Journalists, people, you know, young often, you know, American or French or British women often or men. But my life was actually the, the people I saw every day were the people around my neighborhood and particularly around the shock. And so I really got to know these people. I mean, I got to know one of the people I write about, Idrisa. He was now's best friend from his village and he had come to be a university student and the university was constantly on strike. And so he's a really smart guy and he just didn't really have access to books. And so I had helped him get a subscription, a membership to the British, what's it called, the British Council Library. And so I had like, you know, then we started this relationship where he would tell me what he was reading and he was practicing his English. And so I really spent, you know, like a good year or so kind of getting quite close with him. And I think that there were a number of people that I felt I had, was, was getting to know or got to know quite well. And so they really, you know, I remembered them and they're not close friendships. I haven't been in touch with them since. But they're people I. I remember. And, you know, it was quite a dramatic time. This was sort of the early Internet. There was quite a lot of drama in the street. There was sort of, you know, everyone knew everyone's business. There were kind of affairs and. And new husbands and second wives, and there was witchcraft and there was, you know, flooding, and we had a cholera epidemic. And at the same time as a water cut and no one had water for two weeks. And, you know, I got horribly sick and now came and took care of me. And, you know, there was. And everything was sort of was public and everything was out in the street. And everyone knew who came, you know, who was coming and going from my apartment. And so we all really kind of got to know each other very well. So it felt very easy to write those people. And it was actually a nice chance for me to ask now about them and sort of find out what happened to them. I think they'd all kind of drifted off in their own directions. But, yeah, he and I had a good time sort of remembering about, you know, all the funny things that happened with these people.
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B
Yeah, it's really beautiful part of the piece because it feels like his boutique is already sort of a place where people gather, as you say, you know, sit and have a drink and maybe, you know, sometimes dinner, and everybody shares
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A
from the same bowl, that kind of thing.
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B
And so that when the introduction of the community garden feels like a natural extension of that, like a new place for people to sit and enjoy the company and stuff, it's just. It was really beautifully done. Since I also lived abroad, I lived in London. Not anything like that. Not very communal in London, actually. But I did really relate to that precarious and scruffy life. And I really admired the way you really walk this line in your piece, which I remember about being abroad, which is this line of sticking out like a sore thumb as a foreigner. And you have a lot of really, really good, detailed examples of sort of what that feels like in the piece, but also feeling really at home and having this sort of adopted community of misfits, as often happens when you're abroad. And that really is just like this dichotomy, I feel like not so much in the piece, but just in that life. And I wondered if you had found yourself sort of weighing the balance when you were writing about sort of like. I don't know, this is too generic to say, but, like, how much good and how much bad to include? Like, you know, we have these moments where you talk about the homophobia that you encountered or, you know, the difficulties of being just like a single woman in a city where that was pretty unusual. But then we also have all this. All this, you know, nice community and warm and support and now taking care of you when you're sick and that kind of thing.
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A
Yeah, that's a good question. I thought about it a lot. Yeah, I mean, I guess it still. It makes me nervous to think about it because you don't want to get it wrong. And, you know, it's been a lot of time. You know, we're talking 20 years since the period I'm writing about, and I've had a lot of. I've had a lot of distance between myself and that time. And I think writing about the homophobia, even though I was the victim of it and many other people, I still felt, you know, I was a guest in that country. And I look back at times when I did not behave like a very gracious guest, when, you know, I was unbelievably annoyed by, you know, everything and just the completely sort of chaotic life that I was. Was living the place I was living in, which is not really my. My way. I'm quite an ordered person, I think. And I, you know, I feel regret at the ways in which I. I like, you know, lost my cool at the bus stop because the bus driver wouldn't let me on because I didn't have the exact change or, you know, whatever it was. And I didn't want this piece of writing to be another way in which I could feel bad about the way I had behaved as a guest in this country. And so I did find it very hard to say outright that it was not a place that it was safe to be gay. And then at the same time, that is a fact that it's not a place, safe place to be gay. And there are, you know, I have worked with. Actually, the trip that I took a year ago was working with activists. I was. I was training journalists in writing about hiv, AIDS and other contractable diseases and. And speaking with activists and, you know, people who have been given life sentences for just for being gay. That is a common occurrence. And I did face. Yeah, if I. I had friends who were well educated, who. Who just said horrific things to me, and no one knew that I was gay. And I did, you know, I. I sort of struggle with this idea that I've somehow, like, been in a closet, because that's not what it Was like, for me, it's actually much more complex about than that. I don't think I saw my. As a queer person. I just was a queer person. But it wasn't anything I really thought much about or talked with anyone about. It just was who I am. But I also dated men, and so, you know, people saw me as a straight person and they saw me as, you know, a kind of safe harbor to, like, talk about these, like, awful gay people. And that was very, very hard. And I. So, yeah, I really struggled with this, even though it was something that happened to me, because it's. It's, you know, it's. It's so widespread. It's actually just. It's not, you know, people are. Are hidden. Gay people are hidden. Trans people are hidden and not safe. And at the same time, I mean, I think I gave myself a kind of, you know, I. I have another really close friend, a Senegalese friend who lived for a long time in Canada and France. And every time I, I would, you know, think about this, I would think, well, would I be ashamed if I said this to this friend who, like, sits much more and more kind of. You know, he travels very often to the US and to Europe and is not homophobic at all, but would understand, you know, sort of seize it around, you know, around him. I thought, well, how would he feel? Would he find this offensive? And I think that was a kind of check I did a few times with myself where I thought, well, would I be embarrassed to show this to people who kind of also have my perspective? Or would I feel ashamed or will, you know, would I feel kind of regret? So, yeah, it's hard to write about places you love that are also harming you. You know, it's. But it's. I mean, I think, yeah, the moment that I told now that I was going to marry my then girlfriend was. Was very powerful because it. I mean, it was one of, you know, it was one of the most powerful moments of my life because I realized that when you have true friendship and you truly love someone for who they are, you can actually. It's so simple. You know, he. It was not a question for him. He wasn't going to, like, you know, take a moment to, like, think about whether he was okay with it or, you know, I mean, there are people much closer to me in my life who do not come from, like, very strong homophobic cultures that were much more weird about me marrying a woman. So I think that was. In the end, it was like such a. Like an incredibly powerful moment for me to realize that, like, well, okay, yes, you can have cultures that tend towards this way of thinking or that way of thinking, but actually, true friendship is really kind of surpasses all of that. And that was what I kept as well as the garden. I kept trying to come back to the individual rather than the sort of stereotype of what a large number of people might think about this or that.
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B
Sure, yeah. And, I mean, it lends more impact to the friendship with. Now that we know that this is this larger context. But, yeah, I'm sure it was challenging to write about. We've talked a little bit about the community garden, which sounds like it was sort of the jumping off point for the essay, which is so interesting. I wonder if you could talk more about how gardening factors into your writing. It sounds like you're working on a memoir that's basically about gardening. I mean, am I right in thinking that this might be part of it, or.
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A
Yeah, my book is about radical acts of gardening, which I. Yeah. Moments in my life where I have grown gardens in unusual places. And the essay is. Yes, is kind of woven into it as one of the gardens from my life. And it's funny, I wrote quite. This is, I think, maybe the third essay I've published that's part of the book. And it was only when I wrote this essay that I really realized that everything I write has a garden in it. I've also published some short fiction, and I was actually being interviewed by someone about my short fiction, and he had said, how come there's a garden in every one of your stories? And I was sort of surprised by that. And they weren't stories about gardens. They were just people who happen to have, you know, the characters happen to have gardens. And I realized that there's basically a garden in every single thing I write. And I really started to think about that, like, what's going on there? Because, yeah, if you say that if you tell people you're writing a book about gardening, they get a very different sense of, like, what kind of book it is you're writing. So. Yeah, so my book came about when we. From about a time, or. I started writing about a time when we were living. My family was living in Dallas in Texas, and we. I had just given birth to our son. So it was sort of 20, 21, I guess, coming up to the end of the. By, you know, coming up to the elections in the end of the Biden period. And I started a. You know, we were living in a neighborhood which is of heavily grassed everything is grass. And there's like strict rules about what you can plant and where and how much grass you have to have in your garden. You know, in a. In a. In a state that has severe water shortages, people are out watering their grass, you know, in the sort of 100 degree heat. And I just couldn't bear it. And I took the strip of. I believe it's called an easement. Certainly in Texas it's called an easement, which we don't have these in Britain. So it was like, very new to me. The sort of strip of land between the pavement and the road, which no one really, I guess somehow belongs to you, but also is kind of public land.
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B
City.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Your city land. Yeah. And I just grew this like outrageously sort of scruffy wild vegetable garden on it and then put up signs inviting people to come and pick from it. And that was a whole sort of journey that was going on while I was at home also with a newborn and very isolated from anyone. We didn't really know anyone. We had moved there in 2019 just before COVID And then because I was pregnant, we hadn't really interacted much with. We weren't going to parties or going out with people. We weren't going, you know, no one was wearing masks. And it was like a pretty horrible time in Texas. Well, everywhere but. So I was home with a newborn baby and this garden and thinking, well, okay, I know how to make a garden, and this is a way I can gather a community around me. But people thought I was really out to lunch. They did not. People did not come and pick things in my garden. People thought I was insane. People would stop by to tell me that kids were going to vandalize my garden, to which I kept telling them, I've really heard kids come in late. They're like, well, they're going to come pick your tomatoes. And I was like that. Exactly. That's the whole point. What I really want is someone to come by and secretly take all the tomatoes and eat them and enjoy them. That is truly what I want to happen. And yeah, people were really weirded out by it. And friends, of course, were, you know, were great. And they would come over and we always had our kids birthday parties in the front and the kids would come and pick flowers and cucumbers and, you know, look for insects. And it was great. But generally people thought it was a bit nuts. And I also would find bullets in bullet casings in the garden from, you know, the local shootings that were just going on all the time shooting in the air, shooting each other, drive by shootings. And so yeah, this, the, the, the, the sort of central part of the book really looks at, I guess, you know, this idea that like, who's crazy, right? Like after the birth of my son, I was, I had to seek medical help for my mental state and was kind of passed on to like various counselors and who, you know, thought I was going to harm my baby or who were worried I was going to harm my baby. Which I guess is like, that's the, you know, that's the worry people have. But my worry was that, you know, a bullet was going to harm my baby because this was just after Uvalde, the shooting. I think he was about at 1 when that happened, when, you know, 20, can't remember, five kids were killed at a elementary school, you know, and there were shootings all around us all the time. And we couldn't put our son to sleep in the front room because bullets would, would, you know, we were always hearing about bullets coming through windows and you know, especially around 4th of July and New Year and you know, so we had to have him in the back. But then there was quite a lot of shooting in, in the houses sort of behind our house. And so I was just incredibly worried about him and didn't sleep for about two years and. But I was treated by medical professionals as if I, I just, you know, one therapist said to me, counselor said to me that I just didn't understand this special culture and that no one had actually shot at me. And so, you know, really what was I worrying about? And so, you know, this went on for quite some time. And so my garden was, I think my garden was the response to that. It was kind of like, I don't know how to be in this place that is so violent. And also everyone's telling me that this place is great, but also seems to be extremely violent and really also a lot of homophobia, racism. And my wife in the university system experience just horrific homophobia or things happening at the university and sort of no protection of. It was just an extremely violent place to be a queer person, have a small child. And then this sort of strange kind of discordance with also being told that Texas is great because there's like no income tax, you know, and sort of me trying to work out like, am I crazy? Is this place crazy? Like, who's crazy? And so then I made this garden. And then of course everyone thought I was truly crazy. But it was beautiful. It was just so Beautiful and wild and just full of flowers and vegetables and. And that was kind of my piece of wildness. You know, I'm from a very remote place, and I just really didn't know how to. Where to find a home in this city of extreme violence. And that just didn't feel like a safe place to bring up a child. And so I think my garden was my response to that. And then when I. Yes. I then realized that also every then I realized I'd actually made a garden in every place I'd ever lived. But I'd never actually just had a garden like a normal garden that you buy a house and it has a garden and you grow things. Because I'd never had a sort of place with a garden. So I had always made gardens in strange places and derelict bits of land and other people's pieces of land. And. And that. That was kind of. I realized that gardening was something that I couldn't stop myself from doing. And so that's what the book is about, is about this sort of, like, compulsion to garden in strange places.
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B
I really love that. I think people think of gardening as being. I mean, which it is, you know, calming, relaxing, sort of peaceful and that kind of thing. But it's also, the way you're describing it, it sounds so radical and inspiring and exciting, I think. Sounds like a great book.
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A
Thank you. I mean, I think it's like. I think of it as just, like. Just an act of, like, resistance. I think that planting a garden is a resistance to urbanization and to, you know, buying your food from the supermarket and eating strawberries in December. And just this life that is often so kind of overwhelming and bureaucratic and spent sitting down. And, I mean, I also think about seeds a lot. I was actually just at my son's school just before we got here to chat. I run a few gardening clubs around the island, and I run one at his school. And we were talking about seeds, and we had planted seeds inside these strips of plastic that I'd found on the beach with soil. And you roll them up and you tie them in an elastic band. And then I opened up the roll of seeds to show these kids, you know, they're four or five. Three, four, five. And all the roots, I mean, just this amazing. In just two weeks, all the roots that had grown from these radish seeds. And I was thinking, you know, planting a seed is such an act of, like, radical hope. And, I mean, it's so fragile, this tiny seed, and there's all these things that could harm it. And just amazing to be able to put something in the ground and watch it grow and for kids to be able to see that. And yeah, I also think about gardening as kind of this sort of, you know, it can be this really sort of seen as this kind of like pastime that's like you can like grow your flowers and your hedges and your whatever, but actually you can also just like plant stuff in old pots and drag stuff off the beach. Would put holes in the bottom and stick some soil in. And I was out this afternoon taking soil from a. They cut down a bit of forest near my house and which I was very sad about because I'm also a mushroom forager. And they've just dumped all the soil on the side of the road. And so I just went with a truck and I just stole essentially 15 bags of soil because they're not using it and I don't want to go buy it from a shop. And it's been transported from God knows where. This beautiful soil is just sitting there. And yeah, it just feels the way I do it, I suppose feels radical and it feels, feels. It feels kind of slightly naughty. And yeah, I just feel like I'm doing something wrong and it's great.
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B
Yeah, I don't know, I think the world might be wrong and you're doing it right.
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A
Well, maybe. Yeah.
- [37:19]
B
So always the last question when we ask folks who are on the podcast is just what they're working on now. It sounds like you're still working on the memoir. Is there anything else you want to share with us?
- [37:29]
A
Yeah, pretty much that's it. I think I decided this was going to be the last essay I published so that I could really focus on the memoir. Yeah. So I haven't written, I'm not working on any new essays and although I guess the chapters of the book kind of feel like essays. But yeah, I'm still kind of in the period of living in Texas. And yeah, I'm writing about. I ran the school garden at my kids school in Texas in Dallas. Much to their sort of against their sort of rather reluctantly they let me do it, I guess. And so writing about that at the time when my son was. I guess he was one and a half, two and he. The. The. Some members of staff at the school were struggling with my pronouns and with. Or so my, my son calls me daddy, so I'm his daddy. And people at the school really struggled with that. And so being in the garden was like also sometimes very emotional because my son had started calling me mommy at school. Which was very very hard to see 18 month old CO switching to make other adults feel comfortable and so I'm writing about being queer and being a queer parent in a place where there isn't much room for that and the garden again as a kind of answer to that as like a place this little corner at the back of the school where he and I could take nibble on cucumbers and radishes and kind of be away from these hyper sort of Christian straight ideas of what it is to be a parent. So yeah gardens I love it.
- [39:36]
B
It sounds like an important book and also a book that would be a pleasure to read so I'll look forward to that but no pressure you know no rush.
- [39:44]
A
Thanks.
- [39:45]
B
Well Rose Gilton thank you so much for joining us it's been really great
- [39:48]
A
talking with you it's been lovely. Thank you I really appreciate it.
- [39:52]
B
Listeners, you can read Rose essay and subscribe to the latest issue at the Common online Org.