UNC’s 2026 Frank B. Hanes Writer-In-Residence Reading was given this Monday, March 2, by Ross Gay, one of my favorite writers. The Moeser Auditorium in Hill Hall was packed. For fans such as myself, Gay’s reading was a greatest hits list of prose and poetry, including “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” and “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” His voice rose and fell, his cadence rapid and then slow. He even sang!
Before one poem, Gay gestured to the back of the auditorium. “Aren’t we so, so lucky to have a baby here, burbling in the back? I want the parents to know that baby can get as loud as it wants!” He was responsive to older members of the audience as well. When someone laughed especially loudly at his simile about basketball star James Harden, Gay stopped his reading to express his appreciation. He said that was the first time that someone really connected to the allusion!
Gay also read unpublished material, including an excerpt from his working project about gardening—there was a lovely phrase about “the meek inherit the sweet.” But in my humble opinion, the most entertaining new material was a series of imagined dialogues he’s written between himself and his dog. One of the short vignettes involved the dog slipping into his dream. Isn’t it a fantastic idea that our faithful canines can choose to enter our dreams and share them with us? In this particular dream, Gay’s dog got to meet his deceased father and murdered friend. They were all dancing together in a swirl of delight and love.
During the Q&A after the reading, an audience member asked how all of us could keep ourselves from despair in light of everything happening in the world. I have heard Gay get this question before. He writes about it in the introduction to his book of essays, Inciting Joy. He spoke about the tension he feels with the word “resistance.” It’s not that he ignores problems, but for Gay, the word “resistance” implies that the “problems are bigger than the people.” He said the opposite is true: the people have the power, and when people “gather,” they learn to “care for one another.” I think he meant that our energy is most life-giving when we create community, and these communities can expand and change the world for the better. As part both his opening and closing remarks, Gay read Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Think of Others,” which ends with these brilliant, heartbreaking lines:
And as you think of distant others—think of yourself and say
“I wish I were a candle in the darkness.”
For Gay, the light in the darkness relates to joy—that resonant, evocative, perhaps overused and often misunderstood little word. “When I’m talking about joy … I’m talking about some kind of feeling that emerges when we are trying to hold each other’s sorrow and trying to be with each other in the midst of the fact of our pain.” I know about this kind of joy, and I, too, consider myself to be so, so lucky.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
