Poured Over: Rachel E. Cargle on A Renaissance of Our Own

By Jenna Seery / July 18, 2023 at 6:00 am

“And I’m grateful for the times I got to ask questions. I got to be curious, I got to say, Hey, this looks different over there.”

A Renaissance of Our Own is both memoir and manifesto; a rallying cry to reimagine how we exist and interact with the world and each other. Author and activist Rachel E. Cargle joined us to talk about ambition and curiosity, imposed expectations, grief and joy, her work with the Loveland Foundation, finding what we value most and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.   
       
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books:
A Renaissance of Our Own by Rachel E. Cargle
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Rachel Cargle, you may know her from Instagram. You may know her from Elizabeth’s of Akron because she is a fellow bookseller. And you definitely know her from her activism in and around the online world. She’s also an educator and an entrepreneur, and now the author of a book called A Renaissance of Our Own. And Rachel, it’s so nice to see you. Would you set up this book before we get to your mom, because I’m really excited to talk about your mom. But could you give us a couple of sentences about A Renaissance of Our Own before we really get into the conversation?

Rachel Cargle
Yes, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and chat with you, especially about my book and A Renaissance of Our Own is really a exploration of all the ways that we can reimagine how we exist in the world with ourselves and each other.

MM
I’m so excited for readers to get their hands on this book. But I want to start with your mom, because your mom from very early on was kind of like, my kid has to live somewhere else. I want my kid to have opportunities. I want her to see the world in a much bigger way than maybe your mom was taught. So can we introduce listeners to your mom? Because she sounds really great.

RC
Yeah, for sure. So my mom was disabled Black woman who lived and grew up in the Midwest, and all of those things created boundaries for her. But one thing that my mother did have was a lot of ambition that she couldn’t really live out.. And that seed in particular was curiosity, I believe. And my mom was really invested in getting me interested and what I was capable of doing everything from social things like how capable I would be to make friends and be open, as well as even my academic pursuits. And, you know, setting me up for things like golf classes, because she said she heard that that’s what rich people did in order to network. And so she kind of used me as an opportunity to push out her own ambitions and give me the opportunity to see what I was capable of as well.

And your mom might not have described herself as a feminist. But that’s what it sounds like, to me, just from what you’ve just said right now. I mean, she was trying to set you up for really big luck.

You know, I think my mom would describe herself as if, okay, I think she might have had some tension within her with her own religious upbringing in which feminism wouldn’t have had, you know, space within the church. But I think my mom secretly had this life at her head, that she knew that her religion wouldn’t allow her, disability wouldn’t allow her perhaps, or gender wouldn’t allow her. And she really offered me lots of tools to put in my tool belt throughout my life to have my own decisions about what those might be for me, which is really important.

And it is I promised listeners is going to get us to that you grew up going to school, in the suburbs of Akron in Ohio. Yeah, you grew up in the suburbs, there’s a little bit of code switching that has to happen. There are other people’s expectations, you are bumping into walls, you’re bumping into racism, you’re bumping into all of the things that you kind of hope your kids don’t have to do. Right? Yeah, go through. And then you would leave that space, and you could go home to your mom, and you also had a very active church life as well in a church community. And that is sort of a very different experience where you could relax to a certain extent, but not entirely. So sure you are sort of living in two worlds from a very young age.

Yeah. Yeah, it was something I needed to navigate. And I really, now I find it as a gift for sure this opportunity to kind of know what was true to me and also know what might also be available. I didn’t, I never felt confined to what I understood. Because from very young, I saw that, oh, there’s something different from what is in my own home, there’s different ways of living, there’s ways of speaking, there’s different ways of moving through the world. So I’m really grateful that my mom kind of put me in that double world because it made it very clear early on that there was something else and that I have that I had an option to what I wanted to do in the world, I didn’t feel like I was on a straight track of what had to be.

One of the things I really appreciated about the book. And also the other work that I’ve seen you do online on your Instagram, for instance, is that you openly admit when you’re uncomfortable, and when you’re just saying I have to do this, I need to understand this. I’m going to sort of really examine why I believe what I believe and if you’re wrong, you admit it, and not a lot of people are comfortable doing that. So and that’s a big piece of A Renaissance of Our Own. I love this idea of reimagining right, and the idea that you had this footprint from a very young age to say, hey, wait a minute, what am I looking for? But it didn’t happen overnight.

It definitely didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen early. And I’m grateful for the times I got to ask questions. I got to be curious, I got to say, Hey, this looks different over there. And how does that apply to what I know? Or is there something that could change? You know, everything from playing soccer to being in Girl Scouts to, you know, deciding what high school I wanted to go to? Because I realized that I had a choice. I did my own research to say, okay, what do I kind of want to do in life? And what can I look into to get me on that path? I was really grateful for the times when there was enough openness in my home life, and perhaps in my mentors, other spaces outside of the home, that kind of invited me and assured me to be curious and ask questions, the things that really silence us is when we are looking outside of the norms, looking outside of the structures that make us feel safe, or give us identity really, there’s a bit of an identity crisis that I realized that happens when even younger children ask us like, hey, what’s true about that? And we’re like, Wait, I didn’t even ask that question. Why are you asking me this? Time to consider all of the possibilities. And so having that space to ask questions was great. And asking questions is the first step to reimagining the first step to having a renaissance. It’s when we stay in the status quo. And we say, okay, it just is what it is. That’s when we get on to this what I like to call the life escalator, we’re just going and going and going and we never really get off. And I hope that with this book, I encourage people to question, what are the steps on this escalator were expected to go on? And how can we maybe hop off and build a glass staircase of our own?

Right, and no one is saying that change is easy. I mean, some people like change quite a lot. Some people are very uncomfortable with change. But change, as far as I’m concerned is a good thing, even though you just kind of have to go through it. And one of the things that I really like about Renaissance is that you have activities, you have writing prompts, you have space at the end of the book for people to write their own manifesto, which I think is kind of great, because they’re interacting with you. And the ideas as they go through the book, which I think you know, that’s a really great tool to have, that not everyone has had access to until now.

Yeah, I love having that in the book. But what I really love is that it causes people to interact with themselves. I think that in in the world of self-help books, which this book might be placed, categorized as perhaps we’re often looking for an answer. And I hope that when people are reading this book, and they get to the end of the chapter, and they start going through their own questions and their own prompts, they realize that the answer is really within them. Books often just give us context. So I hope this book gives a context for people to recognize how they themselves show up within the words.

And we use your personal manifesto, as an example, because you talk about the three words that you got to and how you sort of did can we use that as an example for listeners?

So I talked about my highest values, how coming to our highest values, allow us to have strong Yeses and strong Nos and give us confidence to move through the world with an understanding of what we want. Oftentimes, our understanding of what success is, is something that was handed to us from our parents, from society, from the church, from our schools. And so when I took the time to find my highest values, which are ease, abundance, and opportunity, they allowed me to feel a lot more confident in making the decisions and not saying, Oh, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the wrong thing, I can say actually, this thing that might make everyone else uncomfortable, but really gives me ease, or really offers me an abundance in the way that I want to feel abundant. It’s an easy yes. And also what I love about the activities in the book, as people find their own highest values, we really can suss out what our environment is. Because if you’re surrounded by people who are saying, Yeah, I don’t care what your values are, this is what I want you to do, we can really see where we actually sit squarely in our people in our environment. So I hope as people figure out their own highest values, through learning how I did mine, they’re able to just sit more squarely and what their truth is, and that that makes life flow a lot better, I found.

And it’s also really cool when you’re reading the book, going through and seeing the evolution of you, and your thought processes. And your education, too. I didn’t realize you’ve gone back to Columbia, sort of later, you’ve done a couple of years in Ohio and college. And then you’d said hey, this is not quite for me. I’m gonna go to DC for a while. And then you enrolled in Columbia, and then ultimately left because it wasn’t what you needed to get where you were going. And I just I love the idea of a non-traditional education because, you know, not everyone needs to do the exact sort of thing that we’re programmed for. And can we just talk about how you were able to turn that into an experience that really delivered for you because again super untraditional.

Yeah, when I got into Columbia, I was so excited I talk a lot in the book about the first time I walked into the library and I was like, oh my goodness, this is such a beautiful wealth of information for me to pull from. And once I got there, there was just so much static with a lot of the racism that was happening on the campus, a lot of the politics where I wasn’t necessarily feeling safe and grounded. And I really started to consider what my values were and how I wanted to pursue education. And I decided to step away from Columbia and step into more of an autodidactic space. And I said, Okay, I really would rather be stepping away from this whitewashed version of every subject that I’m trying to get into, and learn from academics of color, or even other marginalized academics, people who are disabled people who are queer and say, what other lenses can I learn about the world? And how can I apply that to the work that I want to do? And so I stepped away, I started reaching out to academics and saying, Hey, I love your work. I’ve been reading your book. Do you mind if we chat for a little bit? Can we look over this essay that I wrote, and it ushered me into this new way of learning that was much more aligned with how I wanted to live in the world, and not just in alignment with the accolades that I hoped would validate me in these traditionally white spaces of you know, that quote, unquote, ivory tower.

And it’s a genuine intersectionality, everything you just described as a genuine intersectionality. And that’s part of why I love your work, because you are trying to reach as many people across as many areas as you can. And I just think that’s really important. I think sometimes it’s really easy for us, as a society to get stuck in our lane and the world is so much bigger than that.

Yeah, I think we’ve learned that, particularly my book is very focused in a lot of my anti racism work. And what we see and what I really what I learned a lot at Columbia and speaking in the classroom with a lot of students is, you know, whiteness is the default, it’s the default of what’s understood as true, as what’s understood as real, as what’s understood is valid. And so being able to learn from voices that are not steeped in, you know, this fed to us understanding, you know, when we think of the word exotic, it really means anything other than white, which is so silly, because it makes it the center, and the nucleus of the truth. And then everything else is more is, you know, looks one way or another based on that. And so I really wanted my learning to be more intersectional and to learn from more intersectional people, and I’m grateful that I got that opportunity.

There’s space for everyone really is space for everyone. I can’t say that enough. Can we switch gears for a tiny second and look at some of the writers who have helped you become the writer that you are, I mean, you do have Elizabeth’s of Akron as well, which is a tiny bookstore and writing space that you run. And I love the idea that you’re a fellow bookseller. But let’s talk about writers for a second, who do you love? Who’s helped make you, Rachel?

Yeah, you know, I have really been grateful for of course, the Black feminist writers who gave me a lot of the theory that I speak from Anna Julia Cooper, Maya Angelou, these people who really offered us a beautiful language to understand our positionality in the world, particularly with me as a Black woman. But I also think about all of the children’s book writers, my mother is really when we think about what my mother seeded in me, it was really a love for reading and a love for reading. And so I’m grateful for the way she took the books. I’m thinking particularly about a lot of the American Girl books and the storytelling that was there, and how that pulled me through these emotions and feelings about what it means to live in different spaces and different times. I’m even thinking about like the Judy Blumes, who offered language for feelings that we might not have been able to express, and I have a lot of memories of my mom. I used to get in trouble in school because my mom would hand me really adult books to read and I would be reading them in the library and my teacher would say, why are you reading The Bluest Eye, you’re only in fifth grade. And so the Toni Morrisons who made me feel like I had big thoughts to think had a big effect on me.

Oh, I love that so, so much. And also I have to say, I think you and I share a love of Stephanie Powell Watts. She is amazing. I love her so much. Yeah, it’s funny we had Christina Sharpe on the show a little bit ago in Ordinary Notes she talks about, you know, the Francis picture books and all sorts of stuff that she and I and read in common: Little House on the Prairie and Paddington and all these things. And I love to hear you talk about the books that caught you as a kid. Because I do think that if you start reading as a tiny person, you will continue and you will always, always find the thing that you’re looking for which I love. I mean, this is why I’m a bookseller. But you’re doing so much, you’ve got the Loveland foundation, The Great Unlearn, you’ve got the bookstore, and you’ve got rich auntie supreme and as a fellow Auntie, I love this. Let’s talk about aunties for a second, let’s talk about community because you are doing so much outside of the book. And obviously, the book speaks to all of this work. But I do want to talk about a little bit of what you’re doing just because it’s a lot, my friend, it’s a lot.

Yeah, well, I love the Rich Auntie Supreme Space and set up in particular, because it’s the one space that feels very, like an exhale for me, it’s very fun, very relaxed and celebrated space where a lot of my other work is, you know, in the depths of literature, in the depths of racism and the depths of other spaces that often feel that can feel tight or wild. Rich Auntie Supreme is a space that I created online to allow people but particularly women who have decided to be child free in this lifetime and it’s really a fun space to celebrate what we call an African tradition, the other mother, the space have an opportunity to pour into the community, children in particular, except you don’t have to actually birth a child of your own. And that gives us a richness and people think that rich means money in particular here, but it’s the richness in time, it’s the richness in space, it’s the richness, in even perhaps disposable income, if you’re not paying for diapers and school fees. I was sick earlier this week, and I had all the time in the world to just lay around and take a bath and, you know, really care for myself. And I was like, Ah, I am so happy. I’m a rich auntie supreme to be able to take care of myself in this way. So there’s so many benefits, and it’s really one of the special spaces that I like to exist in, in the midst of all the others.

I get it, but do you think there might be a book in it?

Oh, I hope so. I hope so, particularly, I’ll keep you posted.

I mean, obviously, all of your work touches this book, and this book touches all of your work. But you know, just making a tiny suggestion,

You’ll be the first to know.

Thank you. We appreciate that. I’m having so much fun talking to you. And we are sort of talking about obviously very big subjects as well. But grief is part of this book, grief is part of your journey. And I do want to come back to that. Because obviously grief and joy exist in the same space. And sometimes that’s hard for us to process. And you kind of need both. You can’t just have one over the other. And grief is part of the work you’ve been doing too.

Yeah, there has to be both. And that’s something I’ve really learned in grief. Particularly you know, I write a lot about my mom in the book, and my mom passed away last November and so there is this, even in this moment of my book coming out soon, and her not being here to celebrate it with me is a both and— both the grief of her not being here for you know, when I first heard of my mother passed away from cancer. And when I first heard of her diagnosis, I remember in my crying, I kept saying, How will I read ever again when the person who taught me to read isn’t here. And that’s the depth of the, you know, the effects she had on me obviously, as her child, but how it feels this identity crisis that comes through grief. And as a writer, as a reader, it seems like that’s where a lot of my identities sat with my mother is me as a writer and as a reader. And so there’s the both and of the deep grief of having lost her. But then the joy of, you know, doing this thing that as you said, she prepared me and she really tended to me to do and I am grateful for the both and because staying in one wouldn’t really feel right. And I hope that we all get the chance to remember that there’s the both and to all of our experience, but particularly in grief.

One of the things I’m fascinated by because between your primary Instagram account and the accounts for the other projects as well, you have 2 million followers on Instagram that you can speak to whenever in the middle of the night if someone is there or whatnot. And obviously, books are delightful, and they’re portable. And they don’t require plugging in and all of these other things. But why write a book now?

You know, I think the most wonderful thing about being a writer is that a book is a part of a conversation. I was ready to be in conversation with more people. As you said social media is so specific, whether it’s age, whether its location, whether its interest in being online in general. And I think with this book, I’m very in I’m very invested in a wider conversation, a more intersectional conversation. I just feel so lucky to be a writer and get to put my words out on the page, because I’ve now started the conversation and I’m looking forward to going on tour and all the ways that I’ll be in conversation with my readers, because this is an opportunity to get more in depth and more lively about the things that I’m hoping to say and hear from people.

Totally. Do you have a favorite moment from A Renaissance of Our Own? Did you have an aha moment while you were writing that you just said oh yeah, this is it.

Ooh, you know, I think my favorite thing about the book is that I came up with this title years ago. I came up with the title A Renaissance of Our Own maybe in 2015. Okay 15 2016 When I first moved to New York City, and I was sitting in my little shoebox bedroom and in a shoebox apartment, so it’s smaller blocks in the original shoebox. And I was sitting there and I was feeling so possible. I was just divorced, which I talk about in the book, just moved to the city, knowing absolutely no one which I talked about the book. And I was sitting there, and I was like, I think I’m on the cusp of like, a renaissance of my own. And I wrote that down in the notebook. And I think it’s just so cool. It’s for me now to be in relationship with that version of myself. Like, you’re right girl, you were and I’m looking through the book, and all of the ways that got me here. So I think that’s my favorite part, the title in itself.

It’s a really excellent journey, I have to say, and it’s a pleasure to read. And also, people who don’t write in books you want to write in this book, I dogear. Everything, I annotate everything I am, I destroy galleys when I’m prepping for the show. And I have colleagues who will look at me and be like, Why do you do that? Like, well, this is how this is the process. So if you’re not someone who writes in books, you should write in this book, there is blank space specifically designed for that. Can I ask you how writing A Renaissance of Our Own changed you?

Oh, wow, yes, you can ask that because I think it’s a necessary question. You know, I don’t know if it was the book, or it was turning 34 or it was my mother’s passing. But like, this book exists at a very particular space in my life. And it changed me because, you know, writing a memoir is tough, because it really requires you to look at yourself, choices, to look at your surroundings to look at what you’ve built, and say, That’s exactly what I wanted to do. Or I would have done that different. And I’m sure all people who write memoirs feel this way. But it’s like, you know, there’s a specific version of me that’s existing in these pages. And I’m so intrigued by the specific people who will be in conversation with that version of myself. And then all the other versions over time, I’m thinking of, you know, Joan Didion’s work. And it’s like, I can see the ways that she’s grown and how one book doesn’t necessarily connect to another, but both are very necessary, both are very applicable to various people. And so I think I kind of see that in myself in that book. And I’m looking forward to continuing to write books, both to see myself and for others to see themselves as we all continue to grow.

Have you started the next thing that sort of — lots of people like to start the next thing when the first thing is coming out.

There’s material for next thing for sure, I promise that at some point, I’ll start writing it.

What are you hoping readers who are new to the material who may not know you from your other work? What are you hoping they see or find or experience in A Renaissance of Our Own?

I hope everyone at some point in the book asks themselves a question they’ve never asked themselves before. That’s what I hope, because this book is full of the questions I asked myself, that completely changed my life. And I hope every person sits with a book and sits back and goes, I have never even considered that. And it really puts them on a path that delights and surprises them.

Just reimagining is such a great word. And it’s a great concept. And it’s also it’s kind of nice and gentle. Like you’re not broken, you’re not busted, you just need to evolve maybe, and stuff isn’t working the way it used to. So maybe try something new. And I just I think it’s a really cool turn. Okay, listen, I knew this was going to happen. I knew we were going to bump into time. But before you go, can we talk more about the Loveland Foundation, please, because this is really important work that you’re doing?

Yeah, The Loveland foundation. I started it in 2018. And it’s been an incredible space for us to be able to offer free therapy to Black women and girls. And I often get the question, Rachel, why are you focusing on Black women and girls and nonbinary people? And the reason is because I know that Black women and girls are often the bedrock of our community. And when they heal, it really offers a ripple effect of healing throughout our homes, neighborhoods, churches, communities as a whole. And so I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing and continuing to do.

And we’re really excited. You’re doing it. Rachel Cargle, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, A Renaissance of Our Own is out now. Well, we’ll see what the next book is.

RC
Thank you. Thank you.