How Hanif Abdurraqib Learned to Surrender Himself to the Process

We met around where Kobe refused to flee a little bit of rain. There are only two hoops at the fabled Holcombe Rucker Park. I was throwing up floaters under the one closest to the Harlem River when writer, MacArthur fellow, and hoop evangelist Hanif Abdurraqib sauntered onto the court in a pair of prismatic “Viotech” Dunks and a purple hoodie with wreaths of white acrylic flower petals. Abdurraqib’s hair was long enough to hold a bed of curls and short enough to mirror the outline of his skull. His beard was trimmed, slightly gray, and pristine; his demeanor a mix of pride and relief. His sixth book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, had dropped a day earlier.

“I think this was a hard book to write, in terms of just the execution and what I was trying to do with form,” he said from one of the stands that hug the court like metallic sideburns. “I was trying to make a book that didn’t look like anything else I’d ever seen before, stylistically, formally.”

Molded for your innermost hooper, the essays that populate the text are arranged around descending clocks and designated quarters, sidebars, and intermissions. Ingredients in this compositional gumbo include and transcend nimble prose, kinetic poetry, tender memoir, and affectionate criticism. More often than not, There’s Always This Year evades classification when it comes to content. “I thought this would be a book about basketball, or this would be a book about my childhood,” he later told me, before hoisting up a refined jump shot. “But it became a book about place. It became a book about my dad too. A lot of my dad.”

Essays about grief bleed into essays about dreaming, and community, and pickup games, and, more than once, LeBron. It’s a book about basketball in the way that Songs in the Key of Life is an album about plucking ivory—which is to say it is precisely because it isn’t. Born, raised, and firmly attached to Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib tends to a spirit that’s less possessed creator than cherished elder. He knows what he loves, so he writes to, for, and about all of his beloveds. Sometimes that wins him a national book award. Other times a ball merely surrenders to the air and rides it through a hoop.

Congrats on the release. These can be weird moments for writers. I’m interested in how it feels when the work is out of your hands.

I think I’ve made peace with it now. By the time the work is out of my hands, I’ve controlled all I can. Painstakingly so. And that means that I’ve, in some ways, prepared a gift. I’ve wrapped it and I’ve left it outside, and anyone who wants to can come and grab it. You don’t really want to be an arbiter of how the person utilizes it or uses it or what they take from it or what they see in it.

I always feel like on days that I have long articles that come out, I kind of don’t want to know what people think about it unless I let someone down whom I care about.

Yeah, it feels like none of my business, really. Not in a harsh or hostile way. It feels like your relationship with the work is your relationship with the work. And I think if I were lording over that relationship, it would disrupt your ability to have a relationship with it. I don’t need to know.

My first takeaway upon reading the book was how kaleidoscopic it feels. It’s memoir and poetry and criticism and sportswriting. Was that something that you came into the process intending to do?

I’m always acting in opposition to aboutness. I think if I were to be a writer who’s surrendered to the impulse that I’m following only one path, the books become less interesting because that’s not how our brains work. It’ll actually take more labor for me to home in on a single thread than it would be for me to embrace the multitudinous nature of the threads that actually organically run through my head. To act in opposition to that is also to be generous to both myself and a potential reader. To say, “I trust that you are capable of holding multiple things at once and seeing what you need to see in this book.”

I think about that in a similar way. I sometimes have back-and-forths with folks where, inside, I’m thinking, “Y’all trust your readers less than I do.”

I run into that all the time.

Especially when it comes to issues of race. I’m very much of the belief that we can write about Black people and to Black people, and other folks might fucking still rock with that shit.

I struggle a lot with that particular, that thing of, “I don’t think you’re trusting the reader.” I don’t need to explain every origin story of every person who passes through this piece. In this book, I had the real freedom to actually capitalize off something that started in A Little Devil in America, where I was like, “I’m going to actually operate against explanation.” All the people I loved so much when I was young, all the people I read, music critics especially, wrote as if I already loved the things they were writing about. That afforded me a real opportunity to discover that shit on my own. And I don’t want to rob anyone of that, and I also don’t want to clog up my writing that’s already trying to do so much with these rote explanations.

You mentioned you looked at this book and felt inspired to write a book that you had not seen before. Did you intend for it to be your most poetic work of prose?

I think it became a necessity. There were some things in the book where I was utilizing poetic language and devices just to fill in the gaps. I really pushed myself around metaphor, around imagery, and around the trick of directly addressing [folks] in the second person. The book is a lot of “you.” It begins talking about “our enemies.” To sustain that tone and meter, throughout the book—if we’re talking to “you” in the second person, without it feeling overwhelming—I had to rewire my brain around the limits of my language.

And in order to do that, it was like I had to stretch myself poetically. I haven’t put together a book of poems since Rob [Harvilla] and I talked in 2019. That was my last poetry book. I still write poems so often, but this gave me the opportunity to sit in front of a book and say, “I can kind of flex a little bit, flex these poetic muscles, and trick people into reading.”

It doesn’t have to be different.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be different. I think I talk abstractly about, “Oh, I’m not beholden to genre, and I dabble,” whatever, whatever. This is a book where I’m firmly committed to having a foot in two worlds, which are in fact the same world.

I know I’m asking you to basically choose a baby, so I’m sorry, but do you have a favorite sentence in the English language? I will admit that mine is the opening to Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Mine is also the opening to Jazz! For real. Parts of this book are straight up borrowing from Jazz. Yeah, I love the opening of Jazz. I love the ending of The Women of Brewster Place so much. I love Gloria Naylor and the way that kind of arcs into the closure. I love that. I love the opening of Gravity’s Rainbow. I love “A screaming comes across the sky.” I didn’t really love that whole of the book, but “A screaming comes across the sky,” as a sentence, I wish I wrote.

I’m so committed to the opening sentence, and a lot of my books haven’t had the opportunity to have a really great opening sentence because of structure. This was a book where I was like, I really need to, I want to be in the conversation with the opening sentences that I love. There’s so many gestures toward Morrison in this book. “Song of Solomon” is all about flight.

I was thinking that as I was reading it. I opened up the “Third Quarter” part and immediately thought, “Oh, shit. He’s refashioning the Flying Africans folklore in a book about hoop.”

I’m always reaching for Toni Morrison and failing. But that’s a part of writing. To fail reaching for Toni Morrison is to succeed in a multitude of other ways. And I felt like this was a book where I finally figured out how close I can get to the parts of Morrison’s work that I love. Which is still far away, to be clear. But it’s like I can see it on the horizon, where before I was just kind of aiming with no goal at the sky.

That’s fulfilling.

Yeah. It is. Can I shoot?

[Abdurraqib gets up and attempts to dribble my embarrassingly deflated basketball. I try to get out ahead of it to save myself from total embarrassment.]

This ball is so fucking flat. I’ve been sabotaged.

Yeah, it’s not debilitating though. I’m not going to be able to shoot with this jacket on. Let’s take this off.

When did you think about first writing this book?

2018.

That’s a good amount of time.

But I didn’t start writing it until 2022. And I think to have it in my head for that long allowed for it to come to life for me. I had this in my head for so long because I worked on Little Devil in between. I got a language and ability to write this book through the process of writing that book. And truthfully, this book I wanted to write in 2018, and no one would hear it out.

How do you feel about outlining?

I’m not a good outliner at all. I kind of like to surrender myself to the process. I think that it’s important for me to consider that writing is more than just producing language on a page. We produce language on the page, and that is the creation of a product, but it’s also the end result of a life that leads to an ability to write with some level of ease. Which means that all of us—you included, me included, all of us who write—are several different things before we are a writer, and we have to be those things. I have to be a good sibling, a good dog … I hate the word “dog parent,” but for lack of a better word, dog parent.

It’s a weird thing.

Yeah. Dog owner or whatever.

Well, that sounds even worse.

I know. I know. I have to be a good sports fan, music fan, and I think sometimes when I do feel blocked, in terms of putting words on a page, it’s because I haven’t fulfilled one of those other commitments to myself. If I can’t write and I call my brother, and through a conversation with my brother, something enlivens in me that allows me to return to a page easier, it would be kind of treasonous to not call that phone call a form of writing or engaging in a process of writing.

How did the structure of the work change during the editing process?

In the first draft, it was very about basketball. And it wasn’t even good writing. It was just me explaining the NBA Finals and then explaining the ’80s Cavs and then talking about Terrell Brandon. Thankfully, in the editing process, my editors were like, “You need to turn this book around. You need to begin with you as a teenager, watching this high school game, and then begin to build slowly.” That was such a great bit of advice because even the rewiring of that made the first act of the book about childhood more than about basketball.

It’s spring as hell out here, and I know you are a flora connoisseur. This is my hard-hitting journalism: Orchids, tulips, or sunflowers?

Sunflowers. Sunflowers are my favorite flower. I don’t actually know a lot about flowers when I wrote all those flower poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster. But I don’t know a ton about flowers, but I love a sunflower because I love [how] sunflowers kind of organically bend toward the sun. And to me, that’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that there’s a flower that turns its face toward that which keeps it alive so eagerly. There’s a romanticism of the sunflower that I value.

Are you somebody who reads a bunch of other people as you’re writing?

In my house, I’m one of those people who has multiple computer monitors like I’m a fucking statistician or something. I’ll pull up poems or excerpts from novels. And while I’m writing, I have a stack of books on my desk. I like not being alone. I think writing does not happen alone. If I’m writing in my house and I have an excerpt from Jazz up on my computer, then that means Morrison is in the room with me.

And to even say to myself, “I am not writing alone” means that I am willingly placing myself, at least temporarily, in a lineage that I have responsibility to. Any time with this book where I felt, I don’t think I can pull this off, or I don’t think I can make this book the shape I want it to be, I would turn to the people I was in the room with and say, “But I’m required to at least see this out and see it through.” Because I am in a lineage of people who ran up against walls and then found ways to get through or around those walls.

There are a bunch of lines in this book where I found myself having to pause and reread. One of the only other experiences that I can probably compare it to is when I first was reading Morrison. There were times when she literally taught me how to read. Is that something that you intend for the reader to do—to slow down?

I think this book is trying to attempt a sort of magic trick in that the descending clock makes you distinctly aware that time is running out, and it presents a kind of pace at which the book is moving. But on a sentence level, I’m almost demanding that the reader slows down. And so that was really intentional, to create this kind of dueling narrative.

I’m not saying it’s a hard read, but it is a read where it’s like, I hope people are rereading a line or two here or there, or envisioning something here or there. The whole idea behind that movement and that magic trick is to kind of make it feel, in some ways, like a basketball game. There are basketball games where the minutes fly by, and there are basketball games where the seconds feel like hours.

The last thing I wrote was this long-ass feature on gentrification in Harlem. I ended it by writing about my grandmother. And I knew why I was doing it, but at the same time, I’d also look at it and couldn’t help but think, “You guys don’t deserve my vulnerability” on the internet. Do you ever feel conflicted about showing so much of your own personal history to the public?

For me, I think it’s not a question of the people on the internet or in the world deserving my vulnerability. For me, it’s like, does this person who I love deserve to live in my work? And as a by-product of that, people will have access to them, sure. I’m doing that to say grief or loss or any of these things, they live with us eternally.

So when I’m writing about my mother or even when I’m writing about past versions of myself, who I’m mourning in some ways, that is just kind of refurbishing and refurnishing an ever-growing museum that I want to return to. Because I won’t always have access to the memories that I have of my mother, of my friends who are gone, of my past self.

Every time I turn away from the page and turn back to it, I’m a different person. Time has made me older. Well, not always wiser, but at least newer in some ways, and that means the grief that I carry is also new. I think about this as you are allowing people to bear witness to something that you would be doing anyway to furnish whatever desire and need you have to keep people echoing throughout your writing.

What was the last thing that you learned that excited you?

One thing I learned recently that I love is this hard drive that I have that has all the isolated drum tracks from Stevie Wonder’s golden run of albums in the ’70s. Sometimes Stevie Wonder is drumming, and sometimes someone else is drumming. You can tell when Stevie Wonder is drumming because you can hear him humming in the headphones. And that’s so delightful for me because it’s enforcing the reality that he’s not drumming like a drummer, he’s drumming like a songwriter.

He’s feeling his way through a path that he and only he knows. And that’s really romantic to me. This idea that you are humming your way toward something that you’ve built, and you’re just trying to figure out how to feel your way to the next room and the next room and the next room. That’s one of the greatest things that I keep returning to and learning and relearning. Sometimes, with me, I feel like the work is already written. I’ve already written this. I just need to figure out how to produce the language on the page.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.