Nia King: The podcast is 10 years old this month, which is something I’m really proud

of, and something else that we’re celebrating here today, in addition to the launch of
the third book. When I started the podcast, I was hoping to learn “Is it possible for
queer and trans artists of color to make a living off of their art?” Whether that be their
writing, their visual art, their performance art, or other types of creative and intellectual
labor. Some of our guests will help to answer those questions later tonight.

Maliha Ahmed: While it’s impossible to fully represent the diversity of the artists in the
book on this panel, we have six of the 15 of the artists from the book here with us
tonight. We’ve tried to curate a diverse mix of artists and types of art that’s made. So,
we’ve got an eclectic mix including poets, musicians, creative nonfiction writers, an
illustrator, and a potter. These are all artists we really admire, so we’re really excited to
have them here with us tonight.

Each artist is scheduled to be interviewed for ten minutes. With six artists and two
co-hosts, we will have to keep it to a tight ten for our questions. But there will be a
Q&A at the end. We will be giving preference to questions that are for more than just
one panelist.

Before we get fully into the program, I want to acknowledge that here in the Bay
Area, I am on stolen Ohlone land.

Nia: And here in West Philadelphia, I am on stolen Lenape land.

We would also like to thank our sponsors, the Aydelotte Foundation, Black Studies,
Film & Media Studies, and the Libraries at Swarthmore College. They are enabling
me to be able to pay all the panelists here tonight, and our two interpreters .

And with that, let’s introduce our first guest, Anthony J. Williams. Maliha, do you have a
favorite part or favorite memory from Ant’s interview?

Maliha: I had a few. I’ll just do one, though. I really appreciated how Ant discussed the
way that they took cues from their friends to support them, even when that support
was not directly asked for. They shared a very sweet story of being able to talk a friend
through an anxiety attack because they picked up on a cue that might have otherwise
been ignored. I think through this pandemic, we are probably all taking turns leaning on
each other. So, creating these bonds of trust are crucial for community.

Nia: Yeah. I personally have definitely leaned on Ant for support, and they’ve been
there for me in a big way. Can you tell us a little more about them?

Maliha: Yeah. So, from episodes 73 and 74 of We Want the Airwaves podcast,
Anthony James Williams is a Black queer abolitionist writer and sociologist currently
living on Ohlone land with Apple, their adopted bluenose pitbull. Their work on
Blackness, gender identity, sexuality, and disability has been published in Hazlitt,
California magazine, Electric Lit, and The Outline. Starting their writing and academic
journey as a community college student in 2007, they anticipate completing their UCLA
Sociology PhD in June 2023. For more information, visit antjwilliams.com.

Nia: So, Ant, you brought a piece to share with us tonight that you wrote about mental
health. I’m going to ask you to start by reading, and then we’ll do a short interview
afterwards.

Anthony J. Williams: Hi, my name’s Anthony James Williams, I also go by Ant. And
I’m going to be reading a piece I’ve never read before, “how I deal with wanting to
disappear.”

A small translucent spider scurried across my carpet floor as I rummaged through my

personal archives this weekend. I rediscovered documents I forgot existed, and in so
doing I materialized sentiments that I had only entertained in my head. I unintentionally
made concrete for myself what I had formerly categorized as musings, not realities.

I found a copy of my intake survey from the first time I saw a therapist in my early
twenties. In the densely-printed information sheets on the drug Fluoxetine I witnessed
my introduction to medication and slow increase in dosage from my mid-twenties until
now. I found handwritten receipts from my first experiences with community
acupuncture.

Rifling through these documents was an unsettling experience that I have yet to shake.
To spend hours upon hours in my own head is an involuntary exercise in intellectual
abstraction that occurs daily for me. It does not serve me, but it continues. And this
weekend took it from a regular mental exercise to a physical one where I saw my paper
trail. I could not ignore that my ascent into treatment and maintenance of my health
has also been accompanied by a descent in my own conception of self-worth.

In recognizing and naming the phenomenon — depression and anxiety — I constantly

have to fight with internalized ableism related to eugenicist and capitalist notions of
productivity and worthiness.

Ableism, then, frames my conceptualization of depression as decay in real time. To

label depression as decay is inherently tied up with notions of a previous, more
“normal” self that does not exist. This idealized self was one I saw as capable in ways
— that I am now learning — I no longer see myself. In other words, depression cannot
be decay, even if that is how it feels.

If decay is the process of falling apart, withering away, rotting, decomposing, and
depression is the mechanism through which this actively occurs in my life, then the
story I tell myself is a fallacy rooted in the very ableism I hope to dislodge. Just
because I used brute force to get myself through a situation in the past doesn’t mean
that was the best bet or the standard to which I should hold myself.

So then I must ask myself: What does it mean to disentangle the notion of decay from
depression? And how do I reckon with the notion that at the root of behaviors like my
avoidance of people or my refusal to eat is a profound sense of embarrassment at
being a “successful” and “functional” human? What do I do when I am gentle with
others yet do not extend that same kindness to myself?

Today I woke up to the brilliant sun at around seven in the morning. Recognizing my
exhaustion during the previous evening, I had planned to work for four hours before my
afternoon class. Instead I scrolled Twitter, refreshed my email without truly engaging it,
and texted a friend. After an hour passed I laid in bed, contemplating getting up. I
engaged in a silent mental dialogue about whether to start my day, when that process
would begin, and how it would look. Then my anxiety crept up, producing irrational and
uncomfortable thoughts that physically locked me into place. I eventually succumbed
to sleep, woke back up again, then went back to sleep again before getting up to
shower, eat, and head to class.

I laid in one spot for four hours, not moving, with my brain cycling through more
thoughts than I ever knew I had. While writing about my rough morning in the direct
aftermath of this anxiety attack, I realized: I have almost always seen my chronic fight
to get up in the morning, eat, and lack of desire to exist as a temporary problem. It is
not temporary, though. What shifts is the intensity of the highs and the lows, but
nothing completely goes away, I merely get distracted for short periods of time. I often
don’t want to start my day, I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to go to class, I don’t want
to be around people I know or people I don’t know, and unless I am distracted I usually
don’t want to participate in this world.

Although anxiety stealing four hours of my day is nothing new, the naming of it is
something that only began in the last few years for me. I’ve been oversleeping, over-
performing academically to compensate, and participating in both self-deprecating
thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviors for a long time. There is a sort of freedom in
finally recognizing the patterns and naming them; a form of familiarity that allows for
the prediction of an illness — depression and anxiety — that often feels more powerful
than I’d like to admit.

Yet the realization that this struggle is a lifelong “thing” that I’m still learning how to
handle just makes it worse. There is no “end.” Even as I learn to adapt and live, there is
no end. The suspected chemical imbalance, intergenerational state-sanctioned
violence, and recovery from emotional trauma that I ignored for so long still persist.
There is no panacea, and this truth is something I continue to run from. It means that
these patterns of self-destruction can strike at any times and that is truly unsettling.
Feeling like you cannot control your own brain is very uncomfortable and
disheartening.
What I know is what seems to work for me: check-ins, words of affirmation,
acupuncture, medication, sleep, the sun, dancing, writing, venting, therapy, physical
affection, short periods of isolation, social media fasts, loving company, and more. But
the things and activities I listed are not always available, nor do they always work.
There is no real “always” with my health. And sometimes I just do not have the
capacity. I know, however, that I have the best results when I honestly and truly
recognize the reality and weight of taking my health seriously.

Regardless of how I approach “it,” however, I’m often tired of it. All of it. I want to stop
taking meds, stop going to acupuncture, and stop feeling this way. And it just doesn’t
work like that. Some days all I want to do is buzz off all my hair – which I have done
[laughs] – take down all the art from my walls, and sleep for days. Today was one of
those days, even though April 5th was not, for whatever reason. But I kept going, I
keep going everyday, and I am proud of myself for that, if nothing else.

Thank you.

Nia: Thank you so much for sharing that. It hits so hard that I… like, I have a script in
front of me, and I’m still just at a loss for words. [laughs] There’s so much that
resonated with me, and I imagine probably that resonated with other panelists and
people in the audience. Good thing I have a script, so let’s start there! [laughs]

You have written many essays and been published many places. What made you
decide to share this essay with us here tonight?

Ant: In thinking about what writing I'm most proud of, I realized it was my writing on
mental health and my personal essays. I'm planning to graduate in June, so I’m just
months away. But it hasn’t been my academic writing that has really touched people
that much, or mattered that much. That’s not to say it doesn’t matter, but just what’s
really made an impact on friends, family, strangers, lots of different people has been
my personal essays. And one thing I wrote – it’s hard to say out loud – but my ability
and willingness to put into words experiences that I wish so many less of us related
to. Like the deep darkness of wanting to disappear on a daily basis, but continuing to
do it day after day.

Nia: There’s one thought I was having when you were reading – this is really a friend
question and not an interviewer question – do you ever do that thing where you
bargain with yourself to get out of bed? Where you’re like, “OK, you don’t have to go
to work, but you do have to, like, go to the bathroom. And then once you’re there, you
should probably, like, wash your face and brush your teeth. And like, maybe make
some breakfast.” And like, eventually you’re out the door and going to work but you
have to like lie to yourself to do it.

Ant: [laughs] Yes. Yes! Absolutely. And the other day, actually a few days ago, I had
to tell myself that if I’m not gonna go out and grocery shop, I at least have to use the
frozen cauliflower in my freezer. Because I needed a vegetable. I had a bunch of
protein and grains, but I needed a vegetable. And I was like, “you’re an adult, and I
love you. And so if we’re gonna do this, if we’re not gonna go grocery shopping to
replenish fresh vegetables, use that frozen cauliflower even if you don’t really want to
eat it that much.”

Nia: Yeah. No, that’s great. Cause it’s so hard. I feel like the state of my fridge is really
an indicator of my mental health. [laughs]

My next question is, I get the sense that being open about your struggles with mental
health is political for you. And I was hoping you could tell me, first of all, if that’s a
correct assessment, and second of all, if so, then how?

Ant: Yes, that is a correct assessment. And I’m gonna read from something I wrote,
because I can be a little long-winded sometimes.

So, for me, it’s definitely a political act from survival. It started because I needed to
write about how much pain I was in, and do experience as a Black queer person
living in this world who also learned throughout this process that I’m disabled, right? I
didn’t used to think of myself as disabled.

I sometimes describe my writing – and Tweeting, which I do a lot less now – as

activities I did into the void so I didn't have to share them with people I loved for fear
that they would reject them or me. Instead, I'd just send it into the ether and people
could find it if it spoke to them. But that came from a place of a lot of self-doubt, a lack
of self-worth, and the fear that I was in some way defective.

So, yeah, I think writing about mental health as a Black person in particular, I don't
blame us for the way that we don’t talk about mental health, and the way that we don’t
acknowledge it. I blame the very white capitalist frameworks which we often form our
ideas in relation to. So yes, it's very political because we live in a world that quite
literally gaslights us every day: telling us to remain sane when all the signs point to
insanity actually being a rational response to this wild-ass world we inhabit. So, yeah.
It’s very political and very personal.

Nia: Yeah, and the personal is political, to say nothing that hasn’t been said a million
times before. Unfortunately, we are at time, but I want to thank you for the reading,
and also just for acknowledging the role that internalized ableism plays, because I
think that’s really important to talk about. You know, this idea that we should just suck
it up. That we are not just told by others, but we also tell ourselves all the time, and
that’s not a solution, really. Thank you so much, Anthony.

Ant: Thank you Nia and Maliha.

Maliha: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing with us.

So, Ant and Nia have a two-part podcast interview, that’s episodes 73 and 74.
They touch on topics like interracial dating, being Black in the Bay Area at a time
when the Bay was losing much of its Black population, and Ant’s study abroad
experience in South Africa. And of course you can find an abridged version of the
much-longer interview in our book, Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume Three.
All three volumes of Queer & Trans Artists of Color are also available at the
Philadelphia Free Library and Swarthmore’s McCabe Library. Nia, who is our next
guest?

Nia: Our next guest is Kamal al-Solaylee. Do you have a favorite or most
memorable part from their interview?

Maliha: The original interview Kamal gave was primarily about his second book,
Brown, which condenses a lot of information about what it means to be brown
globally. It’s called [Brown:] What Being Brown Means in the World Today (to
Everyone). So ambitious, we love it. [laughs]

My favorite part was when he said, "In 2011, I was in Hong Kong and I saw this sea of
hundreds or thousands of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers on their day off.
If you ever go to Hong Kong on a Sunday, it's something you should really see. It's
the one day of the week they get off, and they congregate in the downtown core."

In the same way that it's fascinating to put myself under the same umbrella of "brown"
as people who identify so differently from me, I love the idea of being in a huge crowd
of people who are out having a great day off, and the only thing linking them is their
profession. It is harder to imagine thousands of editors out in the town square though.

Nia: Yeah, I’m not sure editors know how to party.

Maliha: This is literally our party for the book.

Nia: And we’re spending it talking about mental health and depression. [laughs] I can’t
hear the audience, but I assume you’re laughing uproariously. And with that, our next
guest.

Maliha: So, our next guest, Kamal al-Solaylee. From episode 67, Kamal al-Solaylee is
the author of the bestseller Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, winner of the 2013
Toronto Book Award and a finalist for the CBC’s Canada Reads and the Hilary Weston
Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the
World Today Means (to Everyone) won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political
Writing and was finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction. He’s
a two-time nominee for the National Magazine Awards, winning a Gold Medal in 2019
for columns. His third book of nonfiction, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come
From, was published in 2021 and it was named Book of the Year by the Globe and
Mail and CBC Radio. He holds a PhD in English and is the director of the School of
Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Please welcome Kamal al-Solaylee!

Kamal al-Solaylee: Hi, everyone.

Nia: Thank you so much for being here! It’s always such a pleasure to talk to you.

Kamal: It’s a delight for me as well.

Nia: I’ll start with some really broad, general questions. You’ve been a journalist now
for many years. What was the initial draw to journalism for you?

Kamal: Money. [laughs] Like, literally.

Nia: Said no one ever.

Kamal: [laughs] Said no one ever. No no, seriously. Because I started in 1996. That
was a different time for journalism. I had just finished a PhD in English, in Victorian
literature, that’s my specialty. I don’t know if you can see my diplomas behind me, and
then Wilkie Collins, the author that I did my PhD on. And there was just absolutely no
work in academia whatsoever.

Surprising enough, there was work in journalism, so I went back to the school where I
eventually became a professor of journalism, Ryerson University in Toronto, and
studied copyediting. So, I got into journalism through copyediting. Because I just
needed something. I was a new immigrant to Canada. I just needed a job, I just needed
something to survive on, and there were lots of copyediting jobs in newspapers and
magazines, and that’s how I got into journalism. It was just literally necessity. It wasn’t
my ambition or my dream at all.

Nia: Honestly, that’s the best answer you could have given. Cause I’m a copyeditor,
and I aspire to write... I mean, I aspire to be like you, I’m not gonna lie. [laughs]

Kamal: I like what Maliha said earlier about the conversations about punctuations and
commas. I related to that very much, that’s what I did for many years.

Nia: All punctuation, all the time. [laughs]

So, you answered this a little bit, but I’m hoping we can dig into it a little more. How did
you go from PhD in Victorian literature to theater critic to political reporter?

Kamal: Well, because I started in the sort of, the gay – the queer publication at the
time, it’s called Xtra, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, which is the local one in
Toronto. Just general arts, film, theater, music, whatever. I basically just did whatever
was given to me because I needed the money, I needed to survive.

But then, a couple years later – unfortunately, the urban weeklies are disappearing
from our landscape. It’s such a rich [place] for younger journalists to cut their teeth in.
There was one called Eye Weekly, kind of think like the Village Voice, or something like
this. And they were looking for someone who does theater. And I applied, and I got it. It
was a freelance continuing contract. Again, theater was not something that was on my
mind, I thought I would be doing books and potentially film. Theater it is! So, I just
educated myself on theater.

As I got older, the world changed completely. 9/11 happened. So I couldn’t just sort of
be this young gay male, Muslim or Arab writer. I just felt the burden of representation,
basically. I just felt I had to take on issues related to being Muslim and brown. Or, Arab
community. So, it just veered into political writing. I continued to be a theater critic
there was less theater and more politics in my future, so I followed that.

Nia: Yeah, that’s a good transition into talking about your newest book, Return: Why
We Go Back to Where We Came From, which is about immigrants who return back to
their homelands. Is that a fair description?

Kamal: Immigrants are one thing, but also the second and third generations who never
set foot in their so-called homeland, ancestral homeland, also. Why they choose to go
back. I speak to a lot of African American people who went back to Ghana, even
though they had not set foot in Africa for their entire life.

Nia: Yeah. So, I know that for Brown, which we talked about in depth in our other
interview, you traveled to 10 different countries. How many countries did you travel to
for Return?

Kamal: Six. Down from eight, originally eight, but then the pandemic happened. I was
supposed to go to Armenia and India. Or, Armenia and East Africa. One of them.
Armenia, was definitely on my to-do list for the spring of 2020. By that point, obviously,
borders were closed, so I had to make the reporting based on everything that I had
reported in 2018 and 2019.

Nia: Yeah. So, I’m guessing that before you go on these reporting trips, you have an
idea of who you want to talk to and what you want to talk to them about. But once you
come back and you’ve gathered all of that material from all of those interviews, how do
you figure out how to turn it into a book? How do you structure the story? For example,
Return starts in Toronto with you, but the first chapter is about Basque Country, why
start there?

Kamal: In that particular case, I really wanted an entry point for a largely white
Canadian audience. Because they would know more about the Basque than they
would ever know about Taiwan, for example. So, I deliberately wanted to start with
something that people would have some kind of frame of reference, maybe even have
visited in person. As a sort of easier way to. . .

But obviously as I reported the book, and the way the chapter ended up, it ended up
touching on a lot of racial politics and racial purity within a Hispanic versus South
American context. Like, returnees of Basque origin from, say, Venezuela. It went to a
much more serious place far too early for my original plan. But, you know, I’m sure
everyone in this panel will probably back me up, books have lives of their own. They
write themselves.

Nia: Yeah. It’s funny that you say that, because I knew nothing about the Basque
Country before I picked up your book. [laughs] And obviously, I still have a lot to learn! I
love reading your books because I learn so much. I had no idea that there were so
many people of Basque descent in Venezuela, or that that’s where a lot of people who
are trying to leave Venezuela are trying to get to.

Another thing I learned reading your other book, Brown, is in the Trinidad chapter. I
didn’t know that there are as many people of Indian, meaning South Asian, descent in
Trinidad as there are Black people in Trinidad. That was fascinating to me. In Brown,
and I think that chapter really illustrates it well, you talk about this phenomenon of
brown people, which used as an umbrella term for Arab, North African, Latinx, South
Asian – who am I forgetting?

Kamal: Yes, that’s the group.

Nia: Brown people being used as a buffer between Black and white. I was hoping you
could talk about that phenomenon a little bit. Because, while this chapter illustrates it
really well, I don’t think Trinidad is the only place it happens.

Kamal: No, and every context, every country has its own cultural and political context.
In this instance, brown people, people particularly from India, South Asia, were brought
to the Caribbean colonies because slavery was abolished. And yet there was a need
for either cheap or free labor. So, they were brought as indentured laborers, and they
were brought particularly to create a wedge, to create a kind of a buffer from the newly
freed Black population.
As I said, the context will vary from place to place, but in that particular context, what
you get is anti-Blackness at its peak. The idea that they are dispensable, they will be
replaced by another group. And, you get the subaltern, basically. The South Asian, or
the Indian subaltern who is willing to do the white man’s bidding in that case, to come
and take the work – I mean, generationally speaking now, it’s been 150 years or more,
so they’re very much integrated. But they arrived in that land as indentured laborers, so
that’s the specific history in Trinidad.

Nia: Yeah. Unfortunately we are out of time, but I’m so glad that you are gonna stay for
the Q&A.

Kamal: Absolutely.

Nia: I know that you’re a little bit under the weather too, and so I super appreciate that
you’re gonna stick it out.

Kamal: That’s OK, I’ve got my water with me. Don’t worry, I’m looking forward to
everyone’s – and I really enjoyed Ant’s reading at the beginning as well. Thank you.

Nia: Thank you so much.

Maliha: Yeah, thank you so much Kamal. Kamal’s new book, Return, is about why
some immigrants return to their home countries. Nia and Kamal do a deep dive into his
second book, Brown, in episode 67 of We Want the Airwaves podcast. And, of course,
you can also read that interview in Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume Three,
available at NiaKing.com. Nia, would you say who is our next guest?

Nia: Yeah. I just want to mention really quickly that Volume Three is only available on
NiaKing.com. The first two, you can find on Amazon, but the third one, you can’t.
Because between publication of the second and third, I learned that Amazon works
with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], so I don’t publish through them any
more. So, be sure to check out NiaKing.com for Volume Three.

Our next guest is Joamette Gil. Do you have a favorite part or favorite memory from her
interview?

Maliha: Yes! So, when I worked with you on this book, I was still quite early in my
career, I still am. But, I struggled with finding work, much less in the field of linguistics.
So, Jo's advice on freelance life has guided me to an interview strategy that I call – not
lying – but "pre-truths." She said that when someone asks her if she knows how to do
something, she says yes and then immediately goes off and learns how to do it. And in
her own words, "Then I get really good, and the rest is history."
Nia: Alright, we can hear her giggling, so let me put her on screen.

Maliha: I still have to read your introduction, Jo. So, from episodes 85 and 86,
Joamette Gil is an Afro-Cuban cartoonist, editor, and letterer for hire. So, please hire
her. Her client list includes Wieden+Kennedy, Abrams ComicArts, Dark Horse, Oni-
Lion Forge, and Macmillan, among others. She’s best known for her independent
comics imprint centering LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC creatives, Power & Magic Press,
publisher of such award-winning titles as Power & Magic: The Queer Witch Comics
Anthology and Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy. Her heart resides in
Miami, Florida, while her body does its thing in Portland, Oregon. Thank you so much,
Jo.

Joamette Gil: Thank you.

Nia: I just noticed the bat behind you. Are you in a comic book store, or is this your
home?

Jo: This is my home. This is one of the completely curated corners of my home. My
new hobby is actually really intense interior decorating, since nowhere is safe to go
anymore. [laughs]

Nia: Fair.

Jo: So yeah, this is one of my favorites right now.

Nia: I love it. I just want to read everything on your shelf. So, first of all, thanks so much
for being here. You are a powerhouse in the world of queer comics publishing. So,
when I first interviewed you, your book Heartwood: Nonbinary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy
had just come out. It’s now in its third printing. So, first of all, congratulations!

Jo: Thank you.

Nia: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what the book is and also just share
what the third printing means to you.

Jo: Thank you! So, Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy is a collection of
short comic stories by non-binary creators, about non-binary characters going through
transformative life experiences when they venture off-trail into nature. It was inspired
by folktales where a character wanders into a forest and must face trials to either
survive or learn a lesson of some kind at the end. I have a very specific script-reading
voice, if y’all haven’t noticed. [laughs] It was also informed by my personal relationship
with forests, which is one of feeling totally myself, shielded from the gaze of society
and its norms. To be in a state of nature where you can’t be anywhere else.
We clearly hit on something that was missing in the comic book market, because every
time it runs out on our shelves, I’m always getting emails being like, “Is Heartwood
coming back?” “Can you double-check to see if there’s any extras, or anything like
that?” Or even libraries saying, like, “Hey, I just heard about this thing, Heartwood, can
we put in an order?” And I’m like, “You missed it.” Right, but like, we’ve had to keep
re-ordering it. It’s our best-selling title to date, and it makes me really happy to put
something out into the world, and then realize, oh, yeah. We were right. It was missing.
And we’re seeing that in the response to it.

Nia: Yeah. I didn’t realize it was your best-selling title. Because Power & Magic also
did really well.

Jo: Oh yeah.

Nia: And it seems like Mañana is also doing very well, from what I can tell.

Jo: Yes, yes it is.

Nia: So, tell us a little bit about Mañana: Latinx Comics from the 25th Century.

Jo: Mañana is the most recent anthology from Power & Magic Press. We put together
a collection of sci-fi and Latinx futurism stories. They’re by a group of 50 creators
from around the Americas and the Caribbean. As you were wrapping up the previous
interview, I actually thought to myself, like, “Nia’s a genius,” because it’s the perfect
thing to talk about right after that, especially talking about Venezuela and Trinidad.
[laughs]

The prompt for this anthology was basically: "All the complicated factors that gave
birth to this identity we call ‘Latinx’ were set in motion about 500 years ago, by
Spanish colonization of the Americas. In another 500 years, how will Latinx peoples
have changed, evolved, or stayed the same?"

Especially in light of everything that was going on and is still going on at the US
border when the project was conceived, it felt right to work on something that
reminded us and everyone else that Latinx people are more than their histories, more
than their present struggles. We're human beings with individual futures, collective
futures, and we have the power to own those futures and shape them.

The book takes the idea in a variety of directions, including what an intergalactic
Incan cultural hegemony could look like, what underground living after the sea rises
above Puerto Rico could look like, knock on wood, [knocks] would look like. Even
what mushroom internet deep in the Amazon could look like. There's a beautiful
balance between cultural traditions that persist 500 years into the future, as well as
things that would completely change about how we relate to each other, who has
power and who doesn’t. It’s very futurist and very optimistic even in the dystopic
settings, where it’s like, “Yeah, the world may go to shit, but we’re still here and we’re
making it work.”

Nia: Yeah. I invited Breena Nuñez, who I think is listening in but driving in a car
somewhere. And she is teaching at CCA [California College of the Arts], and she said
that her students – I think she’s teaching a class on race and comics – loved Mañana.
They love your book.

I have a lot of questions about mushroom internet, but I don’t think we have time.

Jo: [laughs]

Nia: But yeah. We talked pretty extensively in the interview about – like, you were one
of the few artists I interviewed who was actually making a living off of your art. And
you said that supporting yourself through your art has changed over time. I was
hoping you could talk a little bit about that. It’s funny, when Maliha said “Hire her,” I
was like, “I don’t think you can get her anymore.” [Nia and Jo laugh] She’s in very
high demand.

Jo: I always encourage everyone to always try to get me. [laughs] But, yeah. In
our interview for the podcast, I went over my earnings and income sources in
detail, for very specific reasons. a) I think keeping quiet about money helps
capitalism at the end of the day, and we’ve been taught a lot of shame about
what the amount of money we make means, when all it means is where we’re
positioned in capitalism right now.

And b) Like you said, I was sort of fulfilling the central question. So, I wanted to
give people listening in sort of an idea of what that looks like. Because there’s
sort of making a living off of your art, but then there’s also, what is a living?
Like, what is the difference between surviving and thriving? And living wage
and poverty wage and all that good stuff.

Anyway, since then, my income has nearly tripled. For continued transparency, tripled
from somewhere around surviving on, I think it was 20K a year or maybe a little under,
qualifying for food stamps and Medicaid. And also, I like to be very specific that I didn’t
have a partner with a job that was supporting me, and actually paying the bills. Like,
the money I was bringing in was everything. So, yeah. It’s nearly tripled. I no longer
qualify for any federal assistance of any kind. Which is a mixed bag.

But, yeah. Around 2019, I took on a freelance contract that evolved into employment
and a promotion with a media company that creates comics aligned with my values of
representation both on the page and behind the scenes. And a little later, my
reputation as a letterer finally took off to another level, and I reached a point in my
career where – like, today, right now, I just assume that there’s an email coming from
someone that’s gonna offer me a bunch of money for lettering at some point. Literally,
it’s become so consistent that that voice in my head that’s like, “I wonder when the
next thing’s gonna be,” it’s gone.

Nia: I love that for you.

Jo: I love that for me, too. But it’s also very interesting because Mañana was produced
amidst all of these changes taking place. And it sort of created this new situation, this
dynamic between me and the work that truly has my heart, because I’ve kind of
molded myself into a jack-of-all-trades in order to survive. So that there was always
something I could say yes to at any given point, that was just within the field of comics,
which is sort of broadly what I want to be involved in.

Right now, my heart is in publishing marginalized creators, and making more books.
Not just anthologies, but also solo publications that I want to get into. But the past
couple years have sort of involved me taking a step back from that. Letting the books
that are already available do their thing and continue to sell, while sort of finding out
that I’m neurodivergent, that I have ADHD. And taking the time to figure out how that
changes my life story. How that sort of changes why I can’t get up on certain days,
and why I have trouble feeding myself, even though I don’t feel the despair of
depression anymore. Why those things still aren’t working.

So yeah, so I’m very focused right now on developing systems that allow me to
manage everything that I can do. And I just thought that would be an interesting insight
into how sometimes capitalism has this way of like, when it gives you more it also
demands more of you. And it forces you – like survival often forces compromises in
your work, which is one of the themes of your podcast.

And that sometimes those compromises – like that even with me, someone who’s like,
“I’m making a living just on my work,” but to make secure living, that’s still a hurdle
that queer and trans artists of color also face. To gain actual security and padding, is
that possible, then? To continue to focus on the thing that you actually want to put out
into the world.

Nia: Yeah. I’ve definitely learned from interviewing over 100 queer and trans artists of
color that it’s much easier to get paid to make art than it is to get paid to make the kind
of art that you want to make. Unfortunately, we are at time, but thank you so much, Jo.
It’s been a real pleasure having you.

Jo: Thanks.
Maliha: Thank you so much, Jo. Again, you can listen to the longer interview with Jo
on episodes 85 and 86 of We Want the Airwaves podcast, in which she and Nia talk
about race in Cuba, the culture shock of moving from Miami to Savannah, Georgia to
the Pacific Northwest, and of course, making a living as an artist. You can also read an
abridged version of that interview in Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume Three,
available at NiaKing.com.

Transcribed by Amirah Mizrahi