Kiese Laymon on Long Division, Revision, and Authorship as Liberation

About this episode

Welcome back to Sylly, a podcast for the curious and critical. We’re your hosts, Mbiye Kasonga and Tembe Denton-Hurst . In this episode, I (Mbiye) sat down with acclaimed writer Kiese Laymon to talk about his novel Long Division , among other things. Kiese and I had a wide-ranging conversation, using Long Division as our primary text, alongside the fable of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, to think through questions of origin, ambition, and self-love. We also get into the mechanics of Kiese’s process: how sound and rhythm came before sentences for him, how hip-hop taught him more about craft than his classrooms did, and why he believes in revision as an ethos. Books & authors…