YouSaid · the spoken record

Ayana Mathis

lines on the record: 43
first: 2018-12-17
most recent: 2018-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that experiences, and I'm not necessarily talking about my own book, but just in the art and prayer thing, I think that encounters with a profound truth or something that is profoundly beautiful does feel prayerful, I think. You know, it feels poetic”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seemed to me that to be a person of faith meant that I had to deny reason and that I had to deny being a rational person. And one of the things that's really interesting about Thomas Aquinas is that if God is in all things, then there is also God in all of our human capacities, one of which is, of course, reason. And so that we can approach God in some way also through reason, which is a really kind of mind-boggling concept and one that I find...”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God is all of God is all things. And so that all things are imbued with the spirit of God. And therefore, life becomes very sacramental in all aspects of life become very sacramental. It's a really fascinating thing. And it's a fascinating thing too, because if you think about God being in all things, I grew up in the church, very religious upbringing. And when I sort of had my sort of refusal of the church, which happened when I was around 15, and I was abominably behaved, you know, my mother would take me to church and I would sit in the pew muttering about things the minister would say. It was horrible, horrible. And so then she stopped making me go because I was so badly behaved. But one of the things I think that was a struggle for me then, although perhaps not articulated, but it certainly is now, is that I didn't”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What character is you? I don't want to do that. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, the bits of my sort of ways of thinking about things slip into people at certain points and that I think is one of them. I think although it wobbles, my own kind of question of faith is wobbles back and forth constantly. I don't think that it is that unusual to think that there is a powerful mighty being that doesn't necessarily have a sort of day-to-day interaction.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's unusual. Well, it didn't seem unusual to me. There are not very many bits of Ayana in that book. I think that is one sometimes.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My interest in theology has very much to do with the fact that I think that one of the most profound ways to think about our sort of evolution of human thought is to look at the evolution of our relationship to the divine and what people have said about it and written about it and thought about it.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great deal of gratitude, a great sense of responsibility. I think great sense of responsibility. It would seem to me that if one is given a gift like what is happening to this book, that one doesn't get the gift necessarily because one deserves it, but if one receives the gift, you have to go about the business of deserving it. One does get it because”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been exhilarating. It's been stunning. I feel sort of permanently stunned. If I'm trying to kind of compose my face because I'm on TV, but really my face would just kind of have these enormous eyes.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You did it. It's also strange because in so many ways I still think of this book as my word document. I really do. Like it's my word document. I have my tea and my sweatpants and my hair is all, you know, and it's my word document. Yeah. Not me more. No, it's not. No. It's your baby out there in the world.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they are just opened out and they become fully human and they have a full range of their humanity. And I don't think, I hope that.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted people to encounter a fully fleshed out black humanity. That is what I wanted. That was what I had hoped for. And which is why I think I keep going back to this whole notion of character, but why it is so important or was so important for me to tunnel in as deeply as I could into these people's brains and spirits.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really do. The first time I read it, I was either 18 or 19 times really young. And I was reading it in a class. And I think maybe I was 20, it could have even been the third reading. I was in my early 20s and I kept having to put it down. And then when I finally finished it, I just couldn't get myself together. I think I cried for like four hours. I couldn't get myself together.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, beloved did me in. Not the first time I read it, because I think the first time I read it, I was too young to really fully... Absorb and digest it”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like my whole body tense, my entire every muscle rigid. And then getting to the end and falling out on the floor weeping.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first book I love, I think it's a tie. There is a wrinkle in time by Madeline Langel, which I kind of still love. I read it when I was, I don't know, it must have been like eight or something. And the other one is roll of thunder, hear my cry. Oh, I like that too. I just remember weeping. I remember reading it and being just sort of...”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was very interested in these kinds of metaphors of delivery from bondage and things like that because I think the book is a lot about nation building as well. And so that metaphor seemed particularly apt.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I wanted this woman to be strong. I don't think anyone could deny that Hattie is very, very strong, but she's also deeply flawed. She's also afraid. She's also vulnerable. She also suffers from doubt. She suffers from so many things I wanted to sort of grant her a kind of fuller humanity.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I also think that Hattie is very. I wanted her to be I think we have a lot of stereotypes about what strength is. And we have a lot of stereotypes, particularly when we talk about black women's strength, which is this sort of like iron-willed person who just plows through no matter what, who doesn't doubt, who isn't afraid, who isn't all of these things that are, of course, enormously human to be.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she just really honestly thinks that she would be doing them an enormous disservice if she coddled them. And she also doesn't have time. She really is actually quite busy making sure that these kids don't starve to death or that more of them don't die. Everything should happen. And I think”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think also Hattie was a way to sort of imagine what my grandmother would have been like. She was very hard to read my grandmother, very stoic. So was mine. Super enigmatic.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A reader It's funny you should say that, and we mentioned Tony Morrison earlier. Tony Morrison has a funny, I'm going to sort of misquote her, but she says something to the effect of, you know, at times you have to say to a character, listen, pipe down. I'm writing this book, not you. I think there were sort of moments when I had an experience where I thought the character was sort of going off the rails or going into places where I didn't want them to go.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think that I am. I think that this is my life's work, and I'm very happy to have discovered it. But I do honestly believe it's my life's work. But I think that in terms of intention, What I understand to be my job is to put a real fleshed out dimensional human being on a page. And there is no other way to do that than to channel into that human being as deeply as you possibly can. I wouldn't know any other way to go about it. And my interest in creating character is to spend as much time as humanly possible inside their minds. And in that way I can begin to understand them more and they can begin to seem full and real.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very hard question. I think it has to do very much with intention. I think that one of the things, or perhaps the thing that I think is most important about my job as a novelist, if that is my job, which I now suppose I consider it to be. Are you just not letting”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They also begin to have these sort of wider kind of human problems. And that was sort of done on purpose, I think, because I wanted them to be, I really do think that one of the great scopes of the great migration and also one of the great scopes of the civil rights movement was for black people, for us to have our humanity. And our humanity means that we do not have to be defined solely by race. It does not mean that it has to be a complete identity. It doesn't mean it means that we are allowed a breadth and a scope and a largeness. And I hope that my attempt was that as the characters move further away, that their difficulties and strengths would expand in a certain kind of way.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, I did, I felt. It's one of the ways in which also character comes in because once I really understood that this is what this was about, I wanted to be. as much sort of breadth as I possibly could. And I wanted to basically write a novel about the kind of pre-civil rights world with a post-civil rights sensibility. So the arc of the novel, you know, so you start in the 1920s and the end in the 1980s, and one of the things that I had hoped to accomplish is that as the time moves forward and as the characters get further and further away from the move from the south, the sources of their problems become less specific to race, and though they are certainly informed by race clearly. Yes.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't test into a school, so it was neighborhood schools or best kind of thing, public school. And so my mother, I think, endured really a lot of sacrifices, sort of living in neighborhoods where we couldn't really pay the rent and was given. So she gave you what she's very strong. She gave me everything that she had and what she had was an awfully lot.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the right thing, honestly. And not only to do the right thing, but to think the right thing, which is really something, you know, because it's easy to sort of make a show sometimes of doing the right thing, but to think the right thing is really something. She was always extraordinarily encouraging of my writing when I was a little girl. She was deeply encouraging. And I grew up with, we had very, very, very, very little money when I was growing up. When I went to high school, I was able to sort of test into a good high school. But when I was in elementary and middle school,”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother's incredibly well. She's better in the class specifically. I think she's better red than I am. And she's just extraordinary. She's, I don't know, it's hard to begin to describe her because she's so particularly herself. She's a very moral person, which I feel like the word moral has come to be kind of a bad thing, but I mean it in the sense of a person who tends toward good.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a lot And I think also a real sense of the past was always very present with me. I think partially because of my mother's age and because also my grandparents who were quite old, they never talked about the South. It was never a part of anyone's discussion. But, you know, it's sort of in the ether. There's a sensibility about things that I think was transmitted to me.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Exactly. I often will just sort of simply call it humanity, which has come to be kind of a word that we sort of downplay. I like life. Yeah. Yeah, also. These mingled strange, powerful, muscled thing. Why did you choose?”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that, you know? Absolutely unfathomable. I mean, it's not to sort of wax grand, but I think it's appropriate. There's a Martin Luther King quote that says The arc of human history is long, but it bends toward moral justice. And there is something about that bending and that moral justice that I think speaks deeply to whatever it is that's inside us that is divine. And I don't mean necessarily divine. I don't mean it in a Christian sense. I don't mean it in a, but I mean whatever. Yeah, exactly. The bigger with the bigger”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's astounding when I think about, you know, I mean, people came with nothing. Certainly people were in different circumstances when they left the South. But there were so many people that came with an address scribbled on a piece of paper, you know, a few dollars in a pocket, enough food to sort of last whatever, however long the journey might have been. And these people refounded, they very much refounded a nation in the north. And it's astonishing.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Hattie is very loosely inspired by my grandmother. She's not like her because Hattie is much sort of harsher and rageful in certain ways than my own grandmother was. But certainly they share this migratory history and they share also having been, I think, very, very heroic women.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're coming through. They're coming through from something. It's a very mysterious thing. I've never been a writer that sort of talks about channeling things. You know, writers will say, oh, and I felt taken over by the muse and I channeled. My writing process tends to be that every word is a horrible struggle. But when I look back on the work collectively, I will find phrases or sentences that I couldn't say exactly where that came from. And I feel sort of the same about the characters in general. I think Hattie is my own grandparents were a great migration people.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I thought, okay, well, either I'm going to stay here and figure this out, or I'm going to go back to New York. And obviously I wasn't going to go back to New York. So I thought, well, I'll write some short stories. And so I started writing these short stories. And the first short story that I wrote was a kind of strange hybrid of the first chapter in my book, Philadelphia and Jubilee, and the last chapter, Salah. Very different from the way they appear in the novel, but a kind of hybrid. And I brought that into class. Changed everything. Maryland's whole sort of reaction to it was different. My classmate's reaction to it was different. And for myself, I knew that there was something right about it. It's not what ended up in the book, but I knew that I was on the right track.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O ugly cry crisis, massively ugly cry crisis. For a couple of weeks, even though I knew she was right because she was right.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the characters weren't. They weren't fleshed out enough. There was something very superficial about the work on that fictionalized memoir. So I had a big kind of crisis about it, a real crisis of kind of like, what am I doing here? Why am I at this workshop? Ugly crisis.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insufficiently complex. And that is Maryland's ever gracious. And so she sort of puts things that way and you kind of read into you. You interpreted that.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sufficiently complexly complex. Now that might not sound that bad. Yes. But if you are a writer and I write entirely from character that is sort of start to finish kind of what I believe I really believe that I'm putting a person on a page, that is one of the worst things that you could ever possibly hear.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gilead and housekeeping. In housekeep So she sort of waits, she tends to wait until everyone's finished talking, and then she makes her comment. So there's a little silence because everyone could tell Marilyn was about to speak, and Marilyn said, Well, it is true that the characters are insufficiently complex to the situation in which you've placed them. Now,”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I brought it in feedback from my classmates was sort of... Middling, but fine, and then Marilyn Robinson, who was leading my workshop, pulls up.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So you sort of sit there, people have read your manuscript already, and you're silent while you're being workshopped is what we call it. So you're sort of taking notes and everyone is making comments about your work and etc. And it's very humbling. It can be enormously fruitful in terms of being a learning experience. It can also be sort of devastating. It's sort of your heart kind of out there on the table and everyone's criticizing it. Poking at it”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had been working on a completely different book, I thought. I'm sort of new to fiction writing, which is very strange. And I had been working on what I thought was going to be a memoir, a fictionalized memoir. And it was dreadful with a big capital D and awkward and strange. And I took it into, I had gotten accepted to a graduate school, to the Ira Writers Workshop, and I took it into my first workshop.”
2018-12-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Ayana Mathis: “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source