On cities grimed by human hands—by pollution and greed, by corruption and terrorism, by neglect and artificiality, by colonization and apartheid and war—and places of hope, with humanism as their foundation.

On perhaps the most intimate of human interactions.

On language as a wellspring of memory and shared knowledge, and a rubric by which we measure difference—between races, between species, between subjectivities.

On constructing and reconstructing sexuality, upending and transgressing the constricting binaries of gender, and the body as the first and most foundational means of relation.

On the continued tendency in America to define belief by its absence, myriad approaches to spiritual life, and lasting expressions of faith, be it through dogged observance, syncretism, resistance, or renewal.

On the vast cultural, economic, and political space of America, where there is the government and also what governs us: family, preachers, landlords, money, or that thing you feel in the absence of money, corporations, even art.

On yesterday’s legacy, today’s money, and class lines as fault lines—politically fraught and personally subjective, actual and imagined.

On the landscape of the South, at turns surprising and familiar, at once a geographical distinction and a bright spot in the imagination, where burden vies with birthright, and where ignorance and renaissance exist side by side.

On the forces that obstruct expression in an age when writers, activists, and others find themselves visibly, violently, and systematically surveilled and silenced, and where—whether geographically or intellectually, in memory or in cyberspace—we might actually be free. Guernica and Free Word in association with Article 19 and English PEN.

A conversation.