In Conversation with JJJJJerome Ellis

by Ashley-Devon Williamston

JJJJJerome Ellis first appeared on my radar during my first semester at the Writer’s Foundry. We listened to the audio version of his thick, blue book, The Clearing, in a small room full of poets and fiction writers. I hadn’t many expectations when we began listening; I simply skimmed the book before class and noted that there were dense essays at the beginning that expanded into erratic and lovely shapes of text. I ended up being guided by JJJJJerome on a journey to explore what lies in the space between society’s margins and a place where we are all free.

After listening to the book, I knew I had to have a conversation with JJJJJerome. We are not alike in many ways, but are alike in a few crucial ones. Primarily, we are both Black artists who struggle daily to find a balance between who we are and who society says we ought to be. JJJJJerome’s ability to thrive (not just remain alive) and create poignant work that is unconcerned with propriety—work that instead demands validation of the marginalized perspective—is incredibly admirable. As a poet who is still working to develop my voice and artistic aims, The Clearing has offered me avenues for self-realization and communication of that self to various publics.

I had the following conversation with JJJJJerome via Zoom on a cold December day in Brooklyn. I sipped Earl Grey tea and feverishly typed notes as he illuminated his intentions in writing The Clearing, considerations of society at large, and his outlook toward the future.

Note: JJJJJerome Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with *...[clearing]...*. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people with whom he communicates.

Ashley-Devon Willamston: So, we read The Clearing for our first- year practicum at the Foundry. That was when I was learning about your work for the first time, and I’m a huge fan. So this is a fanboy moment, but also an opportunity to probe further into things that don’t make it into the work. On your website, your bio describes you as a “Black disabled animal artist and proud stutterer who researches relationships among Blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time through music, literature, performance, and video.” How did you come to find communication through those artistic mediums?

JJJJJerome Ellis: Well, I think sometimes I describe myself as *...[clearing]...* scatterbrained which I have felt in the past, ashamed of. Like, I often find it hard to stay with one thing. I kind of like to hop around and my mind is very, very scattered. Over time I’ve been able to accept that more and feel less ashamed of how my mind works. But I think it has to do with *...[clearing]...* my being drawn, as you said, to communicating in different mediums. I think growing up having spoken with a stutter my whole life, speech has always been, or has long been, a space of lots of different emotions. Some of them are very challenging. I’ve experienced lots of, and I still do experience, a lot of frustration and stress and anxiety with speaking. I think I want to express myself, so I think maybe *...[clearing]... * I have been drawn to different forms of expression in different mediums because they allow me to express myself without speaking, whether it’s music or writing or music images in videos. And then over time though, also I have come sort of around to fold speech and the way that I speak into those mediums. The Clearing is very much a celebration of that. For many years I have made primarily wordless music. And The Clearing is a place where I’m bringing a lot that I’ve learned in making wordless music or instrumental music, but bringing my voice back into it. And something that comes to mind is what *...[clearing]...* Shy Thompson, who wrote the review for Pitchfork of The Clearing album, says—something along the lines that the album makes a home for the stutter. And I really love that way of looking at it.

Yeah, that’s wonderful. Especially this idea of using other mediums as a way to escape the thing that’s causing you frustration, but then in moving away from something and taking a break from it, you get to eventually come back and have a newfound appreciation for it and create a home for it. In talking about The Clearing specifically, you called the manuscript “an experiment in melismatic writing.” Was this sort of multimedia project, this multifaceted project, successful in doing what you wanted it to do?

It’s so interesting with a work; there’s just something that I have created going out into the world. To me, what the results of the experiment are so much of what I receive *...[clearing]...* what other people tell me about their relationship with the work, whether the book or the album. When someone who stutters *...[clearing]...* tells me that the work really helped them or helped them feel seen, that to me is me receiving feedback on the results of the experiment. I’m so grateful for that. As far as the specific *...[clearing]...* experiment in melismatic writing *...[clearing]...*, I don’t know so much that I can answer that, but I would be curious what other people think about that, including yourself. ’Cause I think one of the things that, to me, what metic, well, to me it’s like, melismatic writing *...[clearing]...* could mean a lot of different things. I find it *...[clearing]...* an ambiguous and kind of open-ended phrase. But part of, to me, what it’s saying is that I wanted to try to write in a way that feels the way that I feel when I listen to *...[clearing]...* that Aretha Franklin “Amazing Grace” performance that I talk about. That there’s this kind of spaciousness and *...[clearing]...* elasticity and *...[clearing]...* an aliveness that I feel in her performance that, to me, has something to do with melisma. And so that was a guiding force for the book. Yeah; I would be curious, do you think the melisma comes through at all?

Oh, I think it absolutely does. It’s interesting to be speaking to it with this sort of relationality to preexisting works—I want my book to feel to others the way that this performance felt to me—a very interesting measure of success and a very intuitive one! So, especially with experiment, there’s a conjuring of this sort of scientific process, but allowing your feelings and your understanding of something to guide whether or not the end result means that the project was worthwhile. As someone who doesn’t have a stutter—I don’t have any highly visible disabilities at all—this was a new thing for me. You explicitly say in the book that this is a space for people to sit with what it means for someone to stutter—to sit in these spaces of clearings and learn to appreciate the space created by the glottal blocking. It definitely did that for me. Everyone has differing abilities, needs, and histories, all of which are going to limit our capacity to fully understand and be understood by others. You queried in The Clearing, specifically, “Can anyone ever tell a clear story?” I’m curious about how you prepare your stories for diverse audiences. For you, is the completeness of a work connected to its clarity and ability to be understood by others? To what extent are you comfortable being misunderstood by your audience?

I love thinking about this, and it’s something I think about so much. There’s, one of the epigraphs of the book from *...[clearing]...* the writer *...[clearing]...* James Scott, where he says illegibility has been and remains a source of *...[clearing]...* political autonomy, something like that. And I find that too, so it’s such an anchor for me. ’Cause I struggle with clarity a lot in different ways. As I was saying, I feel like my brain is very scattered and I find it very hard to find clarity in my own mind. There’s this amazing astrologer, Chani Nicholas, who has this app where it gives you horoscopes and things and it gives you information on how astrology might play a role in your life. There’s this one part where I *...[clearing]...* enter my birthdays and where I was born, and it offers me information about myself that I may or may not resonate with. But one thing it says is “clarity may be an issue for you.” When I read that, I was like, “oh yeah!” And I really struggle with it in writing too, because to me, so much of the way that I experience speaking with the stutter is that there are these forms of being misunderstood that arise for me. Just the other day, I was getting a parking... parking decal for my car, and the person helping me asked me my last name. I paused for a little bit and I was stuttering on my last name. I started spelling it, which I often do. And they asked, “It sounded like you were thinking about your name; what you thinking about?” And I said, “No, I have a stutter.” They said, “Oh, I understand.” But that kind of an encounter happens to me a lot. And it has really shaped me because if something so *...[clearing]...* mundane as asking someone their name can be a site of misunderstanding, then to me, it’s such a core experience in my daily life of the stutter leading to misunderstanding. But *...[clearing]...* I’m so interested in what that misunderstanding holds and can hold.

So one of the contexts that James Scott offers for this idea in his book, Seeing Like a State, about illegibility being a source of political autonomy: there’s this part in it where he’s talking about how in lower Manhattan, especially the West Village, there’s often not a grid, and especially the West Village can be very challenging to navigate because the streets aren’t laid out on a grid how much of Manhattan is. He talks about how certain cities *...[clearing]...* in medieval Europe would be laid out, like how lower Manhattan is, where if you didn’t grow up in that place and you came from another place, you might have a hard time or you might have to really spend time learning how to navigate those streets. He talks about how, *...[clearing]...* how these efforts were made to map and also to create more uniform street patterns. Partially—and I might be way misremembering this—but my memory is that part of the goal of mapping and making more uniformed grids of certain urban city plans is so that the military can access the place more easily in order to quell revolt. So I think about that image a lot *...[clearing]...* how illegibility and opacity, and that which is not clear to certain other people can be a form of *...[clearing]...* protection and can protect certain possibilities. And that clarity can sometimes be used for the purposes of *...[clearing]...* control. So that helps me think about this.

And so it’s something like an answer to your question about my relationship to myself being understood and crafting my stories for different audiences. It’s something that I really grapple with *...[clearing]...* ongoingly. I often try to strike a balance between being clear about what I want to be clear about and inviting and honoring and exploring *...[clearing]...* opacity and mystery and even confusion in other moments. And the artist and writer, *...[clearing]...* Renee Gladman, really helps me with that. She said that she is, she’s interested in confusion in her writing and I think she says “confusion as a mode of perception,” which also brings to mind something that the writer and scholar Alexis *...[clearing]...* Pauline Gumbs said—I think she’s talking about how different marine mammals move—she says something along the lines of, “What is it like to, for example, use sonar? What is it like to move through something that you cannot see, but you use sound to navigate it?” And that comes to mind too *...[clearing]...* there are different forms of clarity to *...[clearing]...* me. And that moment at the parking office—when there’s this moment where the person doesn’t know what’s happening, and they perhaps assumed one thing. You know, it seemed like their first assumption was not that I’m stuttering. That to me, that’s the clearing. The clearing is not always clear. Then there’s this thing that opens them where we got to have this, well, one, we got to have this moment of vulnerability and intimacy that for me is very powerful because for most of my life, I found it extremely hard to just say to someone, “I speak with a stutter.” I just told them that it was all good. For most of my life, I would be extremely ashamed to say that. So that’s big for me, but also, I’m really curious about what is being stewarded in that moment, in that 10 seconds of misunderstanding. So yeah.

That’s so insightful, especially interesting considering that analogy of lower Manhattan. So the fact that this landscape, the topography, is understood by everyone who is familiar, who has spent time in the space, familiarized themselves with the space, doesn’t afford the opportunity for outsiders to come in and control a narrative or control the population. To loop that back to clearings being sort of this site of when outsiders first encounter something that they don’t quite understand, and they’re trying to process what to make of something, you’ve made it clear that you regularly encounter, search for, and hang out in these clearings, these spaces and opportunities for wisdom and insight. So in a fast-paced society like ours that is obsessed with objectivity, utility, productivity and capital, what advice do you have for those trying to find rest and revelation and clearings or even people just in learning what clearings are and how to approach them? Where might they start on that journey?

Well, what comes to mind is how I was listening to this interview on my way home from *...[clearing]...* from Christmas shopping a little earlier today, and it’s an interview with *...[clearing]...* a writing coach named Michelle Boyd. She just published this book called *...[clearing]...* Becoming the Writer You Already Are. I’m halfway through an interview about it, and it’s so amazing. What I’ve gathered is that one of the ideas in the book is, as said in the title, that there are many different kinds of writers, and there are books, guides on how to write and things like that. It seems like one of her ideas is that... one writing tip or method may work well for someone and not work well for someone else. But part of it seems like what she’s offering the book is a way to *...[clearing]...* to understand more deeply and accept and move with and live as the writer that you already are. And *...[clearing]...* and acceptance! For example, she gives the example of how someone might say, “Oh, I really admire this writer, but why don’t I write as fast as they do?” or “Why is revising so hard for me?” things like that. What I was receiving from her is that just the way that you already are is right.

For me, it’s taken me so many years with my stutter and I’m still on an ongoing journey to really let that sink in—the way that I speak
is already right—because most of my life, I felt it was wrong. I tried to speak *...[clearing]...* I tried to get rid of the stutter, I tried to speak fluently or with certain kinds of fluency. And *...[clearing]...* as I’ve been able to accept it more, it’s *...[clearing]...* it’s the less I’ve tried to get rid of the stutter, the more I have realized how many gifts it has for me and how much it has to teach me. So I think of that in response to your question, because to me, the clearing is an idea that applies. It can apply to stuttering, but to me more broadly, the clearing can simply mean a way of *...[clearing]...* a way of thinking about *...[clearing]...* possibility.

*...[clearing]...* extended clearing *...[clearing]...*

Would you be able to say the question again? I think you can help me to hear it again.

What advice do you have for people trying to find the sort of rest and revelation that you mention can occur in clearings? Where might people start? I think what I’m hearing you say is this idea of maybe people—in approaching it similar to meditation— instead of focusing on the correct way to meditate, they should focus on the meditation that their body is calling them to. Is that kind of the direction that I understand you going in?

Yes, absolutely! I’m so glad you said the word “body,” ’cause to me, it’s so much for me finding that rest and that openness is so much about *...[clearing]...* really trying to give *...[clearing]...* give space for what my body is doing, what it wants, what it needs. Again, what Shy Thompson said about making a home for the stutter.

There’s this image that I think is from the philosopher Zhuang Zhou. I think it’s this image of if there’s a bull, and you have a really small pen, the bull might be very frustrated and might try to even knock down the fence of the pen. But if you give the bull a much larger pen, then the bull might feel freer and less confined, less agitated, and might just feel more at peace just living it’s life. I try to approach that with my body, my mind. There are a lot of things that go on in my mind that make me very uncomfortable, that are very hard to handle, that I try to get rid of, try to change. Sometimes when I try to do it—including when I meditate—it’s just, as you said, just to treat this part of my mind that feels like such a burden. What if it just needs more space and by “space,” I mean, what if the more I try to change this part of me, or the more I try to tame it, maybe that just aggravates it. If I just let it be as wild and itself as I can, then maybe that can help.

I also think of this person who has these beautiful illustrations about shame. Their name is *...[clearing]...* Yumi Sakugawa. They say that the parts of yourself that you’re ashamed of are parts that are calling out for deep love and deep *...[clearing]...* gentleness and deep acceptance. So to me, so much of this comes back to acceptance and *...[clearing]...* working from beginning with the assumption that you *...[clearing]...* are divine and there’s nothing wrong with you, especially in a world where—a world—in our world, where it’s structured by capitalism and in everything else doing violence to our bodies and our spirits. All these structures—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy—all these things seem to me to all create different ways to make us feel like there’s something wrong with us and make it hard to let clearings in the broad sense— just spaces of possibility— exist. Capitalism, to me, blocks so many forms of *...[clearing]...* forms of rest. So to me *…[clearing]...* if I were to offer advice, maybe I would form the advice as a question—the question I asked earlier: what happens if you begin with the assumption that you are divine, you are a child of light, and that there’s nothing wrong with you, nothing that you have to fix? Which of course doesn’t mean that we can’t grow, but *...[clearing]...* growth, to me, is a very different thing than fixing something that’s wrong. It’s an ongoing practice and struggle for me to find rest. I mean, as you saw in my auto-response with my email, I’m trying to practice living more slowly *...[clearing]...* and it’s hard.

The first time I skimmed The Clearing, shortly before we had to really dive in for class, one of the first things that it sparked for me was a reminder of jazz. I was delighted to learn that you actively incorporate jazz and other experimental freeform music into your work. As you know, many people adamantly detest and protest jazz, its simultaneously loose and sharp movements. What do you think the jazz haters are missing?

Well, to me, so much of it, of course improvisation plays a role in many musical genres, musical languages, musical cultures. I’m thinking about the roles that improvisation plays in jazz and how, for me, when I’m improvising musically, improvisation brings a set of questions. One of which is, “how do you *...[clearing]...* keep moving when you don’t know what to do?” The beat is going, the drummer is playing and the bass player is playing, and I’m on the saxophone and I have to step up, and I have to start soloing. And it’s like sometimes I have ideas— sometimes it flows, but sometimes it doesn’t. Like, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? I feel like to me, one of *...[clearing]...* one of the beauties of jazz lies in all the different answers and ways of answering *...[clearing]...* that question.

I was rereading this essay by David Foster Wallace the other day called “Authority and American Usage.” He’s talking about language, the English language, and it’s a lot about English usage and grammar and different debates about how *...[clearing]...* how different forms of English should be used. And he gives us an example. So, say someone says “People who eat that mushroom often die.” He is using it as an example to talk about why that sentence is *...[clearing]...* why that sentence has an ambiguity. It seems like, does the sentence mean people who frequently eat that mushroom die? Or is it rather that if you eat that mushroom many times you will probably die? Or is it that if you eat that mushroom even once you are likely to die? So he says the word “often” is placed in an ambiguous place in the sentence. So he gives *...[clearing]...* gives this example as to why a rule against putting a modifier in a certain part of the sentence is not so helpful. But I think of it because he is talking about how grammar relates to utility. And in this case, of course, the utility of language in telling us what is safe and what is not. So I’m thinking about that in terms of *...[clearing]...* of if we think of jazz as a musical language, that part of its grammar—if you will—has to do with how different answers to the specific *...[clearing]...* parameters of improvisation.

So *...[clearing]...* to me, it’s like there are these stakes at play in *...[clearing]...* in jazz. And perhaps it can help if someone wants to appreciate jazz more or understand jazz or understand the act as a language, perhaps it can help to learn more about the questions that, to me, are raised by *...[clearing]...* improvisation. The other thing that comes to mind is just *...[clearing]...* just the role that *...[clearing]...* race has played and continues to play in jazz. I think of Mary Lou Williams, a pianist *...[clearing]...* and composer. I was watching this concert with her recently on YouTube, and I think she was talking about how jazz has its origins in the experiences of *...[clearing]...* of enslaved people in the United States especially, and the role of the blues. To me, part of understanding, or part of appreciating and listening to jazz, is through what... Mary Lou Williams talks about—jazz as the expression of the experience of *...[clearing]...* African Americans. Again *...[clearing]...* again, the questions of what have different African Americans wanted to express, and how has jazz met or failed to meet their needs for certain forms of expression? Yeah, that’s a wonderful question.

That’s a wonderful answer. I appreciate it. I mean, I really wanted to ask you that because since its inception, people have had strong opinions about jazz, many of which have been negative. I think that you’re correct in saying this is a form of music born out of the Great Migration, this experience of the descendants of slaves moving and asking questions, trying to make their way in the world, trying to find stability in precarity. And I think people are afraid of it, of exploring that, of hearing those stories. They might have to admit some other things that they might be denying if they do lean into those stories and give them validity. I hope that our readers really sit with that. And if they’re not jazz fans, maybe they will approach the genre with a new perspective. With regards to that—people giving new things a chance. Are there any projects or artists that you’re inspired by right now?

Yeah, definitely. Renee Gladman is an artist who I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with only recently in the past month. And it’s been just so *...[clearing]...* inspiring for me. I’ve *...[clearing]...* been reading her books and listening to different readings on YouTube. My friend, the writer *...[clearing]...* and poet, Chris Martin *...[clearing]...* has been inspiring me a lot lately. He has this book that just came out called May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future. And he’s really challenging and guiding me in thinking about *...[clearing]...* about divergence, about poetry, about *...[clearing]...* disability, about healing, and that’s been really nourishing. I’ve been doing a lot of reading right now, which has been really nice. ’Cause I have, for a lot of this year, I’ve found it hard to connect with reading in a lot of moments. So another *...[clearing]...* a perennial inspiration for me is the historian Saidiya Hartman. I was reading this interview in the recent issue of BOMB magazine at that between Saidiya Hartman and the scholars Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, that really opens so much for me.

There’s some poems by the poet Monica Yoon, who has also been such a guide and inspiration for me, and I’m so excited for her new book that’s coming out next March. Today, I’ve been watching the Pride and Prejudice mini series that the BBC made, I think maybe in the nineties. And I’m just having a blast watching that, just admiring *...[clearing]...* admiring like the story and the writing from Jane Austen and then the performances of this interpretation, the music and the directing are so wonderful. So that’s that. That’s been really nice. Yeah, I’m so grateful for all the art and all the artists who are nourishing.

Absolutely. I hope that our readers find a wealth of opportunities and engagement in these works. Some which I’m familiar with, some of which are new to me. Maybe I’ll spend some time sitting with them during my winter break. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Are there any projects that you’re looking forward to sharing with us?

Oh, thank you Ashley-Devon. It’s been such a gift talking with you. I’m so grateful that you reached out to me. Thank you for your patience with me as I’ve been moving so slowly. Yeah, I’m excited *..[clearing]...* I’m excited about *...[clearing]...* this book that I’m completing now, Aster of Ceremonies, that will come out next summer from Milkweed Editions. And *...[clearing]...* yeah, I feel really nervous about it too. Brought up a lot of emotions writing it, and it’s been challenging, and I’m excited, yeah! Well, I don’t even know *...[clearing]...* I’m excited *...[clearing]...* I think, and nervous and anxious about it. But as we were talking about with the experiment earlier, it too is an experiment, and I’m curious to find out the results of the experiment from feedback from readers. So that’s *...[clearing]...* that’s on the horizon. And I think I may release a little music next year. So yeah, I’ll look forward to that. I’ll be doing some concerts and things next year, and I’ve been really enjoying being able to play concerts and be with people live again, even though the pandemic is still happening. So yeah. Thank you.