How to Be a Better Human - How to tap into the transformative power of reading (with Michelle Kuo)

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

When was the last time you got lost in a book? If it’s been a minute, today’s guest might recommend you visit a local library or bookstore ASAP. Michelle Kuo is a teacher, lawyer, writer who is passionate about reading in communities with other people, whether that's through book clubs or in prisons. In this episode, we talk about how reading skills reveal the bridging power of the written word -- as well as the limitations of its power. In 2017, she released “Reading with Patrick”, a memoir of teaching reading in a rural county jail in Arkansas. The book explores Michelle’s relationship with a former student, Patrick, whom she wrote and read with, prompting questions about what we owe each other in a world where economic and racial inequality determine life outcomes. You can follow Michelle through her newsletter at ampleroad.substack.com To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I'm Chris Duffy, and this is How to Be a Better Human. On today's episode, we are talking about the power of reading. One of my absolute favorite things to do is to get lost in the story of a really good book. It is something that I love to do when I have a free day, but sometimes it's also the only thing that will really let me escape fully if I'm in a particularly stressful time. Reading is access to knowledge. It's access to different places and people and ideas and experiences. And in case you can't tell, I was an English major. That's what they teach us in those classes, is how to

sell other people on books. Not any other practical information other than that. But look, whatever you studied and whatever your relationship is to reading, whether you love it or you dread it, I am excited for you to hear from today's guest, Michelle Kuo, who, in addition to her work as a lawyer and an educator, she is the author of a beautiful book about a former student of hers, Patrick. Patrick was involved in a tragic crime and he ended up incarcerated. Michelle visited him in prison regularly and they would sit reading together or Patrick would write letters to his daughter. Here is how Michelle described those moments in her TEDx talk. Reading also changed our relationship with each other.

It gave us an occasion for intimacy to see beyond our points of view. And reading took an unequal relationship and gave us a momentary equality. When you meet somebody as a reader, you meet him for the first time, newly, freshly. reader, you meet him for the first time, newly, freshly. There is no way you can know what his favorite line will be, what memories and private griefs he has. And you face the ultimate privacy of his inner life. And then you start to wonder, well, what is my inner life made of? What do I have that's worthwhile to share with another? I want to close on some of my favorite lines from Patrick's letters to his daughter.

The river is shadowy in some places, but the light shines through the cracks of trees. On some branches hang plenty of mulberries. You stretch your arm straight out to grab some. And this lovely letter where he writes, close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the words. I know this poem by heart and I would like you to know it too.

poem by heart, and I would like you to know it too. We are going to have so much more about the power of language and possibilities of connection with Michelle Kuo right after this. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And we're back. My name's Michelle Kuo. I'm a writer, a teacher, a social justice lawyer. I am also the author of a book called Reading with Patrick, which is about literacy and incarceration in rural Arkansas. You've had a varied career and these threads have been woven through it that I think often are not connected in other people's minds, right? Like poetry and social justice and law.

Can you just walk us through, like, how did you get to where you are? And can you tell me how you got involved with this stuff in the first place? Oh, gosh. Well, I think I think the first way you asked it is beautiful. I mean, I think we have a tendency to think that artists and poetry are apolitical and in their own world and self-absorbed. I mean, this was my impression when I was in college. I was like, what are you doing?

I was like, why are you like, like people are dying or homeless and you're like smoking up and talking about something very obscure. And so I've come around to understand that these things are really, they're very mutually reinforcing. I mean, when I was teaching, when I first got out of college and I taught in this area in rural Arkansas, we had no art program, no library, no music program. You realize that we need these things. We need stories. We need art to find meaning, to connect to something larger than ourselves, something that doesn't involve just focusing on our material deprivation. And when I saw that the students

were interested in so many different kinds of books, an obscure book about Japanese haiku, a rhyming dictionary, Viking myths, polar bears, geography, as well as the revolutionary Black history, I just realized that you cannot fill up somebody with a sense of who you think they should be. You have to give them a sense of warmth for themselves, the kind of mysterious individuality that gives us life, that makes us want to live. The feeling that I, Michelle, or you, Chris, like only you love this piece of writing or this piece of art or this photograph or this particular picture of a tree more than anybody else, you know? And I just, I just started thinking, okay, so it's not this binary of art, decadent, justice, now good.

It's these things like when we, when we experience stories and we experience art, we feel a sense of, of dignity and a sense of what is possible. And that makes us want to, that opens us up to the whole world and to what other people also deserve to feel. To kind of keep going into this in a more in-depth way, why is reading important to you? You know, when you're a kid, you don't think necessarily in terms of racial categories or class categories or geographical. You're just looking for a story and you want to connect to that person. And if the storyteller tells it well, you do care about that person. And I think it's this quiet space where you have the capacity to evaluate other people's choices and actions alongside

this complicated inner life, which is flawed. So for me, it offers that space of kind of both offers a space where I can have moral clarity about what I think is beautiful and admirable. I think for other people, it can be really different. I will say that for my students, that was precisely what I saw in them, that they had been used to being labeled as quote-unquote bad kids. I taught at a school that was basically considered the dumping ground for kids who were incorrigible, who wouldn't quote-unquote behave. And, you know, for kids who were thought of as really quote-unquote unruly in the classroom, behave. And, you know, for for kids who are thought of as really, quote unquote, unruly in the classroom, during silent reading, you couldn't hear a pin drop.

Every student was reading and connecting with this fictional character. Yes, I find for myself, the times when I most appreciate reading, and I, you know, I've always loved reading. So I know some people have a different experience, a personal relationship with it. Mine has always been that it's been something that I love to do and as an escape, but I find that I appreciate it the most when I'm in particularly stressful times or something that is kind of negative. It's like, I can escape into this completely other world and just live in there for a little bit and take a break. And it seems like, it seems to me like one of the big things that reading can help you do is build an imagination. And empathy can be one part of

imagination, right? But imagining what someone who lived a thousand years ago or a thousand years in the future, or someone who has nothing in common with you in terms of your identity, what they experience and go through, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, I feel like it just helps you build that interior world, which then can be a real release. I would love to hear more about what it was like teaching fifth grade and what kind of stories your students most loved. Same as you. I felt like there was no universal answer. It wasn't like they all love this story. It was like different people really latched on to different books, right? Like there was

there were some kids that absolutely loved the books that were funny and like could not get enough of the jokes in a book like, you know, Wayside School. And then there were kids who were like passionate about historical biographies and everything in between. Well, you're a former teacher, but you're also an author and you're also someone who talks about this concept of reading a lot. How can someone become a better reader? I honestly think you just have to actually read, which is really hard to do when there's so many good shows on Netflix now. But I do think that the baseline is to create a quiet space where the phone is off and where you can focus. It's interesting when you put it like that, it almost seems like there's a direct line between

reading and meditation and mindfulness, like creating this space where we don't let the distractions of the day butt in. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think it is a meditative space and I think it is harder for everybody to read these days. I'm the worst at this, but more recently I've been just not taking the phone into my room before I go to sleep consciously and so that I'm not on it when I go to bed and when I wake up. People who like reading love to talk books. So I have a big book question for you. Do you believe that once you start a book, you got to finish it? Or do don't like a book to stop, don't torture yourself. It's not meant to be torture. It's not meant to be. I mean, it's supposed to be a little bit of medicine, I think, for these long old books. But ultimately, it shouldn't it shouldn't be that bad. I mean, if you just don't like a book, just don't do it. funny because I hear that. But like, whenever I start a book, I just feel like so guilty if I don't finish it. So then it'll be like, I'll go through a period where I read three books that I

love in a month. And then I'll read one book for five months, because I'm just like, I gotta read another 10 pages in this 400 page book. Okay, in the in the battle of paper versus e reader, where are you? I am a paper person. Every time I do e reading,, I just can't, I just don't read as carefully. I just find that I just, I have the same instinct as I do with a phone, which is that I start just paging through it really fast. So I am a paper person. The other thing about e-readers that bothers me is that when you get to the last page, you don't know what's the last page. And I've been in so many situations where I'm like, oh no, you don't know what's the last page. And I've been in so many situations where I'm like, oh, no, I didn't know it was the last page. If I had known it was the last page, I would have savored this and read more slowly, you know? So that's so funny.

You're like, I know, no, no, it's not supposed to be done. I wasn't ready for that. I had to emotionally prepare and I wasn't allowed. How can how can reading help us to connect with other people? There are, I mean, there's so many different ways. The most explicit way, which is the topic of the book, and that's something I'm really passionate about, is reading in communities with other people, whether that's through book clubs or in prisons. Like as a college professor, I'm always trying to tell my students to do close reading, to focus on a passage and to really be able to dwell on it, to dwell on its complexities

and ambiguities and to be uncomfortable. But on the other hand, my rule when I was teaching grade school was like, I'm never going to be a snob about what book you read. I don't care what book it is. Just keep, as long as it keeps, gets you turning pages, whether it's in a prison or an elite classroom of a liberal arts college, you have one text and you have 20 different interpretations of it. And you have 20 different interpretations because there are 20 people with different lived experiences, different kinds of families from different areas and who are of different ages. And there's something so beautiful about that. I remember

reading Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is this Tolstoy story of a man who grows older from lawyer to judge and is constantly thinking about how to be like everybody else and how to ascend in this hierarchy. And then on his deathbed, he's just like, what was that all for? You know, and I read, you know, I read this with like 20 incarcerated people at San Quentin prison. And what struck me so much, first of all, was that so many of them hated judges, they'd all been before judges, they'd all been like looked down by judges, some of them for really minor crimes. And yet they could read, they read the story and they could situate the judge within an elite milieu that teaches contempt of criminals. that teaches contempt of criminals. And they could relate to this more universal idea of wondering, what is my life for? Is there a God that offers relief to me in spite of my failings? And it was so interesting to talk about that story with people who had so many different

experiences. It was such evidence to me that you can never predict also people's responses to a text, you know? Okay, so thinking about how people come at these stories from different backgrounds and different experiences, you know, one thing I was really struck by is how you address that head on in a way that I think many authors and speakers might feel afraid to do.

I want to play a clip from your talk where you're doing exactly that. Let me take a step back and just ask an uncomfortable question. Who am I to tell this story? Isn't this Patrick's story? Patrick's the one who lived with this pain, and I have never been hungry a day in my life. I thought about this question a lot, but what I want to say is that the story is not just about Patrick, it's about us.

It's about the inequality between us, the world of plenty that Patrick and his parents and his grandparents have been shut out of. In this story, I represent that world of plenty. And in telling this story, I didn't want to hide myself, hide the power that I do have. In telling this story, I wanted to expose that power and then to ask,

how do we diminish the distance between us? Reading is one way to close that distance. It gives us a quiet universe that we can share together, that we can share in equally. We're going to talk more about that idea of creating a small, quiet universe that we can share in just a moment. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push,

find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And we're back. Now, Michelle, you talk a lot about how you visit your former student, Patrick, in prison. And that seems to me like a scenario where for many of us, our first instinct wouldn't be like, let's read together silently. And yet that really was the root of this new relationship and it deepened a connection between the two of you. So how were you able to do that? What made that work? I think when two people are coming from a totally different place, you need something that creates a common shared world. It wouldn't have worked with another student who didn't like reading. It works when both people already have a fundamental love of the text.

magical kind of plot first of all that that takes you away from the room that you're in which is which is a nothing room i mean there's there's no light there's like cobwebs um so you're entering you're leaving that room and you're entering a world where there's four children who look out for each other and he also has three siblings and um are fighting an evil witch and one of this one of the kids is hoping for redemption and forgiveness and that gives us something to talk about that gives me a sense of his own hope we both can talk about who our favorite characters are. I'm really happy because it was so important to me that a kid didn't internalize any stereotypes about what kind of person he was, whether he was the kind of person who read or whether he was capable of loving books. Like you become equals during that process. equals during that process. I mean, this is true of any good classroom where there's a sense of adventure that everybody is trying to discover things independently, but also together. But I think it's even more powerful in the context of a place like a prison, because people are so accustomed to being told what to do. So this kind of really rigid environment where you're

dehumanized requires light. And I think that light is being traded, treated equally as if you have a mind and experience that contributes to a discussion, you know, and, and how else it contributes to a discussion than by responding to a story. As far as when we choose what we read, how can we be more strategic or intentional about what it is that we actually are reading? So I do think choosing and breaking out of one's own patterns is good. And that's not, and like I said before, I'm not snobby at all about what people read. But for instance, my husband and I started this book club recently, and we were so excited to talk about such different books with people.

So we read the Makioka Sisters. It's this Japanese novel set in the 1930s, and it's about these four sisters. And there's this rule that a younger sister can't be married off until her older sister is married off until her older sister's married off. So there's just a series of suitors, of Japanese male suitors, you know, who get rejected over and over again. And there's just having this very detailed, pleasurable, slightly ambiguous, thick novel in which you are trying to enter a different social world, a different historical time. And the writer, Tanizaki, is so ambiguous about whether he's launching a social critique, whether he's nostalgic for this world or, you know, of this world where the women are beholden to these old patriarchal customs,

or whether he, you know, it it just created this really wonderful conversation or a book club where we're trying to figure out or we couldn't figure out what the author wanted and we were trying to undo and unmake our own assumptions to enter a different time period and that seems really important now because people are so i think think people these days, everybody, including myself, we all want to have an opinion about something. And there's a tendency to be outraged or to be really judgmental and to immediately label something as sexist, racist, fascist. Not that those labels sometimes aren't deserved, but I think when we enter historical novels, especially, we're forced to step away from our assumptions

and to really attempt to learn the customs and thoughts of a different, of a time period. Do you consciously think about like varying the books that you're reading? And how do you do that? Do you have like a test for yourself or you go, okay, what were the last three books? The next one has to be different. Or how do you actually physically do it? That's interesting. I guess I'm not sure. I know that I try not to read too much contemporary fiction.

I find that when I do that, I lose a sense of possibility sometimes. I mean, there's some great contemporary fiction, just like you said, like I love Pachinko. And I just finished the Ishiguro book, Laura and the Sun, and read it really compulsively. But there must be a part of me

that is loyal to the old greats and that feels that there's a sense of expansive moral sensibility. So Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and maybe this is a part of me that was just a really studious teenager where I felt like I just needed to know all the classics and read all of them.

And I understand that some classics are being canceled now. But so I guess that is one part about it. The other thing that I think is missing in my, maybe this is because I'm married to a historian, but I just feel like there are really large gaps in my historical knowledge. So I try to read fiction that gives, fiction or nonfiction that helps me fill in the gaps of different time periods. That really hits to me on one of the most powerful parts of reading, which is that it can help us provide meaning,

whether that is a literal explanation or just an emotional one. And I think that that's often the books that we connect with the most is where we see a version of ourselves in those books. I want to go back to something that we talked about a little earlier, which is to me, there's something very interesting and unique about you, which is that you are deeply engaged with the injustices of the world and you work on that day to day. But you also are deeply engaged with poetry and with literature and with like the beauty of writing. And those two things,

many of us do not see as natural fits together. So how do you balance living in this interior world of the mind with the very real problems of the exterior world? That's a question I struggle with every day. So it's a really hard question. And I don't have any great answers to that, except to say that something I keep coming back to in the past 20 years, I kept coming back to it when I was teaching students and then when I was lawyering for people who have much less than me,

is that none of them want you in their work if you resent them for sucking up your creativity. They want to see you thriving. They're so generous. I mean, people are generous in general, but especially people who are disenfranchised understand, I think, the thirst to be creative. And they find ways to be creative,

even with very few resources. There's something so irrepressible about the creative spirit, about how people with nothing will find a way to create, to make art or to sing or to devise something out of the few things they have. And that's something that I reminded myself when I, when I was writing, when I was like, well, why do I deserve to tell a story? Do I think I'm that important that I need to, you know, make a poem? And I realized that if I didn't grant myself the license to do that, In a way, I would be saying that certain people are

allowed to make art and other people art. And that's just fundamentally against my own philosophy. You know, one thing that it makes me think of is there's the social psychology concept of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? That we have to get our base needs taken care of first, like food, water, shelter, before we can do these higher level things. But in a lot of ways, it's not as simple as that, right? Like, that's why people who are hungry or unhoused still can appreciate and need beauty as well. And it's not like they don't, it's not like they forget that they also need the more basic needs, but that it's not one than the other, that it's not only people

who have everything else taken care of can appreciate art or can create art. I think that's absolutely right. And to even add to that, you know, people need to eat and I'm a believer in social welfare and food stamps, but it's only to say that when we provide

opportunities for music and art and poetry, we give people a sense of hope and dignity. Every art teacher knows this, that there's something equalizing about art. One of the things that many of the reviews of your book latched onto, and that I think is also very, it's really noticeable when you read it, is that you don't romanticize the idea that reading with Patrick solved all of his problems, or that reading with people who are incarcerated will get them out of prison and solve the big social issues in their lives. At the same time, it's not that you don't say that it has no value, but I think there's often the sense of like, and all they needed was a poem.

And you push back on that where you're like, no, that's not all they need. So when you think about it, what do you think of as the promise of reading? And what do you think of as its limits? I'm really glad you said that. So the ending of the book, the story itself is not a Hollywood ending. He, Patrick, really struggles. He faces all of these different barriers. So part of me is like, well, what was the point of reading? What is the story about? I think it's about everything that we're talking about that reading but it could have also been other forms of art honors the existence of an inner life of a person of his wishes of his fears of his ability to imagine other places of his ability to um name his favorite season, to picture a deer in the first frost, in the first snow. I just so deeply believe that everybody has an inner life, but some people don't get to

live nurturing it. And that material deprivation, one of the great tragedies of material deprivation isn't just the actual deprivation of food or access to health care. But one of the great tragedies is that you don't get to actually nurture the part of you that you think is beautiful and worthwhile. That's the part of you that remembers how you felt when your daughter was born or that lives with the memory of your mother taking care of you or that has hope for, you know, a better future. It makes me think about the idea that a lot of what you're talking about is that we can use reading and we can use art more generally to nurture the part of us that is human, the tender, vulnerable part that would otherwise get beaten down by the day-to-day needs of the world. So now, this is the super fun part, right? Last question. What's one way in which you personally right now are trying to be a better human? Oh, I love that question that you ask people.

I mean, this this is really trite, but learning how to be patient with myself and not to measure my success based on others. I really love your conversation about this, about how one measures self-worth. I mean, I don't want to be one of those people who blames things on their parents, but definitely when I was growing up, I was compared a lot to other Asian American kids who were highly successful. It's really destructive to compare one's success to others.

And I think one way in which I'm trying to be better is to really accept that my success has to be on my own terms and not on any other metrics. And that means just being really patient with my own artistic projects and community projects. It means believing that I have something to say, but I don't have to say it all the time. It doesn't have to be in the pages of some elite publication. It just has to be written somewhere in my private journal, you know, and that itself is of worth. But there's something really corrupting, I think, for any, not just writers, but anybody who does media or art where where recognition is so scarce that that becomes the only currency that

you care about and and it really takes the original it's like why i love working with young people because the thirst to make art is like a hundred percent of the thirst and then they haven't yet entered an industry to realize that there are other forms in which they can be recognized you know um i'm always trying to i guess this is a very long-winded question answer to realize that there are other forms in which they can be recognized. I'm always trying to, I guess this is a very long-winded answer to your question, but in terms of being better, I'm always trying to return to that original primal state I had when I was working in the shadows and completely invisible. You know, I cherish that time in my life. Yeah, there's something so beautiful about the beginning of a creative pursuit where

it is surprising to you that you're learning that you have this ability rather than trying to get other people to appreciate it in a way that you've learned they perhaps should or you want them to. I think that's so true because your only enemy during that time is yourself, you know, and this idea that creativity comes from an absence of like self-consciousness, you know, and that's often that's often at the beginning. I love that. That's also something to tie it all back to reading. That's something that's so interesting about reading is it's inherently not performative. No one else can see, right? Unless someone's looking over your shoulder,

and even then they can't tell really how fast you're reading except for the page. So it is something that is purely just for us that we don't do for other people. We just do for our internal enjoyment. That's so brilliant. That is so true. And it's a truly introspective thing that's not worth facing.

And that's partly why I get really anxious about teaching like a beloved text among many people, because I don't want them to feel that there's a smartest thing a person can say. I mean, sometimes I think if a conversation is, if a book is taught poorly, that a person can walk away thinking, well, my experience of the book was incorrect because that really smart person said this other thing, you know, and I want to preserve that magic of this, this, this relationship with the book. One of my tricks, I know we're going over, so I'm just going to say one last, we can wrap up, but this is what you're saying right now is so beautiful and profound. I don't want to lose this

for the podcast. I was an English major in college. And one of my tricks that my wife is always so upset what she hears about because she was not an English major. So she was like, I always just had to do the homework. You just did the homework. But occasionally for me, when I didn't have time to read all of the book that I was supposed to read, I would go in and I would try and identify who in the class the professor thought was most annoying. And then I would just disagree with whatever they said. most annoying. And then I would just disagree with whatever they said. So they would say something and then I would go, actually, I think the complete opposite. I do not think that he's the hero of this book. And the professor would be like, I love this guy. This guy's a genius. He disagreed with the annoying kid. That's so funny. And yes, I definitely think your professor appreciated it because a professor can't like disagree with a person, you know, but they can use you as a vessel. So good work. Yeah. I was like, sometimes I can't read disagree with a person, you know, but they can use you as a vessel. So good work. Yeah, I was like, sometimes I can't read the novel, but I can read the room.

That's hilarious. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for all of the work that you do. And thank you for the beautiful book that you wrote. Oh, this has been such a delight. I learned so much from this conversation, and I really appreciate you reading the book. and I really appreciate you reading the book. That is it for today's episode. This has been How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy.

Thank you so much to our guest, Michelle Kuo. On the TED side, this show is produced by bookworm Abhimanyu Das, Kindle queen Daniela Balarezo, bookmark collector Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and advanced copy connoisseur Cara Newman. And from PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Paige Turner, Jocelyn Gonzalez, and amateur librarian Sandra Lopez-Monsalve. Thanks for listening, and I hope you find a great book. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you.

From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.