Cole Arthur Riley: The Call to Write

To kick off season four of the Sound of the Genuine, Dr. Patrick B. Reyes has a conversation with Cole Arthur Riley. She talks about being a shy, often non-verbal child and how her love of words, nurtured by her family, helped her express herself as a writer at a very young age.

Cole currently serves as the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making. She is also the creator of Black Liturgies, a space that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion. Her debut book, This Here Flesh is a New York Times bestseller and available wherever books are sold. 

Portrait Illustration by: Triyas
Music by: @siryalibeats

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Transcript

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Patrick: Welcome to the Sound of the Genuine. I'm your host, Dr. Patrick Reyes. And today we have a very special guest and New York times bestselling writer and poet, Cole Arthur Riley. Her bestseller, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories that Make Us, is one of my favorite reads from last year. Her writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. And she serves as a spiritual teacher in residence with the Cornell University's Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making. I'm so grateful that Cole, who's also the founder and maker of Black Liturgies on social media has joined us for a conversation. 

Before we get to that interview though, please help us out and give us a review of this show. It helps us invite and bring guests like Cole on to the Sound of the Genuine. So head on over to apple podcasts or Spotify, wherever you're listening to this, and give us that five star review. And now to the interview with Cole. 

All right Cole, I'm so glad you joined us on the Sound of the Genuine to tell us a little about your story. Now, I know you're a New York Times bestselling author, that you run an incredible social media presence with Black Liturgies. But you didn't wake up, I'm assuming, and say this is what I wanna do in the world. When you came into it, social media didn't even exist! Take me back to the beginning. Tell me about your people. Take me back to your genesis.

Cole: Sure. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A city girl at heart. I was raised by my father, who raised my sister and I, and later on my younger brother and I had no intentions of this particular life. For as long as I can remember, I've been a bit of a writer. I was an incredibly shy child. I wasn't a very verbal child. I've talked about this a bit, but had an anxiety disorder called selective mutism that is not all that uncommon in children, specifically. It's a little more rare to find in an adult, but it essentially means you feel unable to speak in the presence of anyone other than a very select number of people. For me, that was my immediate family. 

But other than that I didn't speak much. That was the great concern of my life, I would say, for other people on my life from, you know, the time I was about three to the age of around seven. And so my father a very tender and just emotionally intelligent human, he wanted to help me find some tool of expression, I think. Like everyone in my family is pretty outgoing, pretty loud. I mean, I have an older sister who's just very charismatic and has always been very verbal and good with her words. And I think my father knew I would need something like, some way of moving in the world that looked distinct from the people around me.

So he started having me write, not just me, everyone in my family really. He's not a writer, nor is he a reader, but that was his idea. So he would have us do these like writing contests and would give us a word and everyone had to write a poem in a certain amount of time. And like it was a little bit of healthy competition. We had to journal every day. Always journaling. Was never policed in terms of what I wrote, but always, "Did you write?" And so, I really took to that as a, as like my earliest form of expression and communication with the world. And I wasn't thinking of myself as a writer for a while, but I think I thought of it as a like necessity, almost.

Yeah I don't think it'd be too dramatic to say like, kind of a form of survival. And I wasn't raised in a Christian home so, not a very religious environment. But it, I think it makes sense in hindsight that as I became more aware of the spiritual, more attuned to that in myself that I would somehow connect that to the writing I was already doing. Yeah.

Patrick: As you think about this younger self who's a writer, who's finding ways of expression, some words…what were some of the themes or imaginations or dreams that you had as you put these words down in your journal and your writing? And who did you share that world with? Was it just your inner circle? Was it just your dad and sister?

Cole: It's funny, I recently went through a bunch of old journals and like old pieces of writing for a different podcast that I was doing. And I was going through and I was realizing that I never showed anyone my journals or anything like that, but I would write as if someone someday would read them. Which just cracks me up because I was just so shy and so not the person who would be like, ‘this is going to be important someday.’

But I kind of love…I wrote with a lot of gravity and like I would define slang terms for this theoretical reader in 20 years. I'd be like L O L, which means laughing out loud. Which is just so hilarious to everyone who knows me. They're like, what were you thinking? It feels weird to say, but if I'm honest, I guess I did have an imagination that someday I'd be in a situation where someone would read something that I'd written and it could mean something. Even though I was just like writing about my day mostly, or making up like short stories later on in like middle school.

So I didn't actually begin to share my writing with people other than my father, my sister, until middle school. I ended up in some like English festival type things. I don't know how common these [are], it's like kids who don't do sports, you know, these like more academic teams. So I was on our English festival team and I would write stories and submit them in these competitions.

That was my first experience and I remember the first short story I wrote. I think I was in sixth grade and it was a short story called Blood and Cinnamon. Very dramatic, if that gives you insight into who I was. I wrote this short story called Blood and Cinnamon and submitted that and it was the first time I had people other than my father, tell me there might be something here. You should really explore this. 

And I did somewhat, but…so I haven't spoken about my grandmother yet, who was more of a maternal figure in my life growing up. My grandmother was a writer. So my father, not a writer. No one in my family loves a book, okay? If there was a book in our house, it was gonna be mine.

But my grandmother was a deep reader a deep feeler, a poet. And there was a day - and this would've also been in middle school - where I found this book. It was like an anthology, this navy blue with like silver embossed lettering. I found this hardcover book under our coffee table and I was like, well that's strange cuz again, not many books in my house. So, in my memory, it was this very big moment and like, it was a very dramatic uncovering. But I, yeah, I picked it up and the first poem in it was my grandmother's. She had written a poem and contributed to this anthology. And we were never told about it, it was just something I happened upon. And I realized, wow. I'd always seen her kinda, what I thought was like doodling or like doing things, in journals. But it occurred to me, wow, someone someday could actually hold something that I've written, in a tangible way. That, I think, there's a lot of mystery that that memory contains. But something about that moment gave me a real imagination for taking my writing seriously at a young age.

Patrick: And what do you do with that as you start thinking about how you wanna move in the world or what you wanna do, where you wanna put this passion? What started sparking your imagination about how you might lean into this writing?

Cole: I mean, I started to read just nonstop. Maybe like not an entirely healthy amount of reading I was doing. Again, I was very socially withdrawn and so I think I found community in books. I think I was finding like just like an excitement that I wasn't experiencing in my day-to-day life cuz I wasn't speaking much. I was finding that in books, I was reading constantly.

I mean, A lot of Goosebumps, which is, you know, not exactly high brow literature. But to me, it was like a thrill and yeah. And just other things as well. I didn't know what I was doing. I don't think it was like a cognitive decision to read so that I could learn the craft, but I think that's what was happening. Like I had some kind of hunger and I knew, okay, I like this but I don't really know much about it. You're not really getting lessons on craft or things like that in school, in those early years. Even in high school, I didn't really receive much of that. And so I think reading was a way to get me to, I don't know, get a little closer to that world.

So yeah, I wrote, but then throughout high school I kept writing. I journaled nearly every day, even after my father stopped demanding it. It became my own practice. But I would say something shifted in high school where I got away from it a bit. I'm a first-generation college student and there's a lot of incentives around black women in STEM that were beginning to emerge around that time.

And I was good enough at physics where I switched from English Festival to science club, and like mathletes, as a different kind of necessity of - if I'm gonna get to college, this is the way to do it as a black girl in what was it, 2008 is try to get some kind of STEM scholarship. So I dove into the sciences actually. And loved it on some level. I went into college as a physics major. And I was taking all of these like science classes but at the same time using up all my electives in the English department, like finding ways to make, you know, like I needed to get a music elective and instead of just taking a music class and like surely there's an English class on music that will satisfy, you know? And so that's what I was doing was finding any way to access the English department. And I told myself at one point - I think I have this journal somewhere - if one person while I'm here tells me…a professor specifically I was thinking…tells me I could do this, tells me that this is something I should pursue…I was a little bit jaded at this point, you know, as an 18-year-old, if one person tells me then I'm gonna pursue it. It was like a freshman seminar and a poetry class and a professor pulled me aside and was like, are you sure you want to do physics? Is this really the direction you want to go?

And so I switched. I switched two years into my college experience. Though I didn't take the first professor all that seriously. I thought she felt bad for me. But by the time the second person told me, I was like, all right, it's happening. So I switched two years into college into a writing major and yeah, never really looked back.

Patrick: As you think about that vocational shift for those who knew you, what was that conversation like? I'm getting outta physics, I'm gonna pursue this writing thing. And follow up question is, as you're pursuing this writing, what did you have in mind that you wanted to write?

Cole: Yeah, I mean the people who were around me, I think, were terrified. Rightfully so. I think the kind of job potential, especially the community that I was coming from, I felt very much chosen - like a chosen one - to be able to attend college at all. And so I felt no small amount of pressure to make people proud back home. I went to Pitt, so I wasn't that far from home. I'm from Pittsburgh, I went to Pitt. But I felt this sense of responsibility to the community I'd come from and to my parents. So there were a lot of people who were terrified, especially the people I knew at the time in college. 

I found it interesting though that in my family there really wasn't much pushback, which we all laugh about now and think is a bit of a miracle cuz my dad is very like practical. Like he's not an artist, you know, would never claim to be, he doesn't have the heart of an artist necessarily.

But yeah, they really honored that in me and I think it felt so familiar to them. So I should say at the same time as I'm coming home to myself as a writer, I had begun attending church. So this is very, kind of foreign to my family. There was a year growing up where we attended church but really just to accompany my great aunt who had lost her husband.

And apart from that, again, not a religious family. So I think there was a lot of fear and anxiety within my family about the Christian world that I was getting wrapped up in. I think they were very concerned I was gonna lose myself, lose my sense of blackness and I think their fears were really valid. A lot of their fears were really credible, I think. And so maybe this is my suspicion that when I told them I was switching into writing, something about that felt so familiar, it was a way to kind of mitigate the complete unknown of this other world I was entering. Like one way to say like, oh, well we know this of Cole. This is the daughter I know, the writer.

And so, I’ve wondered about that, if in that way, it helped them to feel connected to me in a time where I was entering spaces they were really afraid of, really sensitive to. 

Patrick: And as you think about that move, so you got the support, you've made this commitment. What did you wanna write? I mean, was it always this sort of memoir/spiritual/autobiography, thinking about the Christian world, or were you secretly trying to do sci-fi or full novels or what, children's books? I don't know. Poetry? What was your imagination that you would write about?

Cole: Yeah memoir, furthest thing from my mind - any kind of nonfiction really was furthest from my mind. I was on a fiction track and was mostly focusing on the short story. I mean, I still call that my first love. And you know, I was talking to my agent the other day and I'm like, I'm supposed to be editing, but I can't stop writing this short story. So it's definitely still very near to me. I think something about short stories gives you…I mean I love novels as well but the short story, because it's so minimal in plot, it counters that plot minimalism with a very deep kind of interrogation of the character.

You know, you see into their interior worlds often, or you really get to watch with nuance, you know, small moments tend to be more nuanced with the kind of experience or essence of a person come to life. I'm big on characters and so you find that in short stories. And I will say the English department at Pitt, at least at that point was, very heavily interested in short stories as well. I don't know if this is common in English departments everywhere, but it was certainly my experience. So yeah, I was writing a lot of short stories, some poetry, but not poetry I felt really confident in. And by the time I graduated I thought, I'd come back down to Earth a bit and was like, I'm gonna need to make money.I'm gonna need to survive. And so it was then I started to think more of like creative non-fiction and trying to write for some kind of non-profit organization somewhere that would allow me to travel or something like that. I began to think that way. 

That's not what ended up happening. I ended up joining an organization or working for an organization that was in the collegiate ministry world. But as I did that I think I'm surprised how well I was able to keep up writing. So I had a professor. I no longer do this. I should preface by saying I no longer write every day. Everyone always asks me, cuz that used to be in my bio. But up until the time This Here Flesh came out, I wrote every day.

Even if it was just a paragraph, I had a professor who gave me that advice and I really did so, and I think I needed to because I wasn't in the literary world. I was really diving more into Christian spaces into kind of spiritual thought and things like that, and I think I needed then, more than ever, to still get that creative energy out of me. So I was writing every day, but very distant from the literary world post graduating. Yeah.

Patrick: It reminds us of something we say in another podcast we have for the Scholars Guide that you don't have to write every day to be a writer every day. As you think about your vocation in this college campus climate and the way, at least my experience, of that world is it's like event driven, week to week, religious services, special events. As you start thinking about and moving towards your writing vocation, your call in this context, when does this start to take shape? Because I'm assuming, and this is a big assumption, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but you had to carve out time to do this work. It wasn't like you got hired in campus ministry and they said, you know what? You should just write while you're here. I'm sure that would've been nice. Tell us about that process.

Cole: Yeah. That would've been nice. I think it took a lot of self-possession really is the word that comes to mind. Like to really know myself, I think I learned this from my grandmother whose words unfortunately, were never really written. She never really was able to access the literary world. I mean the world of publishing and literature, it's so opaque to outsiders and you really need an entrance, a kind of miracle. And for black woman, especially for black women in my grandmother's time to kind of enter that realm. So, you know, she wasn't someone whose words were being read.

She wasn't someone whose words were being bought. And yet I watched her, through high school and college, continue to write, you know, continue to write these stories to work on this novel that sadly she never finished. But I think witnessing that kind of fidelity to the art that she had despite kind of circumstances, despite who was paying her, did help me take myself a little more seriously.

You know, the difficult thing about being a writer is like no one ever quite feels confident to call themselves a writer. We're often like waiting for someone else to tell us, like to affirm that or else you feel a bit fraudulent. Maybe I should just be using I statements. That's at least how I've experienced it, where it's like you're waiting for some kind of exterior cue to tell you you're a writer. And I think, you know, art is way more complicated than…the vocation of an artist is a lot more complicated where it really does have to have some like, I don't know, be connected to some interior stability or interior sense of self, where, you know, whether or not the exterior world is able to acknowledge it. You can still maintain your sense of self, your sense of identity as a writer. 

I think I did that. I mean, there were seasons where I didn't, where I kinda relinquished that - I still wrote, but still kind of relinquished that identity. But I always came back to it and I think the people that I worked with - I mean, by the time I started working with Cornell students and by that time was making it clear that literature was kind of core to my style of spiritual formation and my focus in ministry. And, you know, I made that clear on the outset which was helpful. So, you know, I would, you know, go into scripture with students. But honestly, that was a bit rare. Which was…what was more common is you know, reading a book. Picking up Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, and then talking about that, you know, over coffee or Silence by Endo and talking about that.

And so I found a way to kind of scratch that itch, I think, in creative ways while still honor this desire I had to, I don't know, do a lot of spiritual imagining/ reimagining.

Patrick: That's fantastic. I mean, I think so many folks have calls or internal narratives around wanting to be a writer, wanting to be an artist, and trying to find a way to make that craft work with the context they're in. I mean, it's just, it's a gift that you've given the world. You know, pivoting towards This Here Flesh and the book comes out. You've written, you've spent time doing it, how has your vocation, how has your call as a writer, as an author shifted now that it's not just affirmed by…I'm thinking back to your journal: If one person just tells me that I should do this…” You are a New York Times bestselling author. So how's that shifted your vocation or affirmed it? Tell me a little about that.

Cole: I mean, so many complicated emotions. I'll start with, you know, the positive really, which is that yeah, in ways it has affirmed it. Especially, beginning with Black Liturgies and sharing some writing there. I owe so much to that community of people that really like, I feel, went to bat for my words in unexpected ways. Like there's just a group of people who are so committed and so encouraging and black women who are writers who were reaching out to me and helping me make connections, helping me find my first literary agent without me asking. You know, so I owe a lot to that community and still I was really nervous for This Here Flesh to come out because it's so different than Black Liturgies. With Black Liturgies, I really try to de-center myself as best I can. I think it can be really tricky with liturgical writing and to have such a strong like face to it, you know, so to speak. And so I’ve been pretty careful, pretty cautious, um, not to have, you know, Cole Arthur Riley, like eclipse Black Liturgies, which is create a distance. Also liturgy is a very particular kind of writing. One that I'd done previously as just like my own practice and for a church I was involved in, but not one that I ever really saw as my, like calling in terms of a writer.

You know, I never really thought liturgy would be connected to that. So when I was given the opportunity to write a book, I wanted to stay true to…you know, true to who I am as a writer. And I was really nervous, you know, how people would receive a book that it's not a book of liturgies, you know, it's a book of storytelling and it's not a book where I'm kind of standing on the perimeter, but my family's stories are what hold the whole thing together. So it felt really… really bareing. I know a lot of, a lot of writers talk about that sense of exposure that you feel even if you're not writing about your family, there's a sense of that, you know? But especially because I really wanted to honor the stories in my family. I felt this sense of exposure and, you know, did I do right by the story? And so it's affirming to hear people respond well to this style of writing as well. And yeah, it definitely makes me feel good, but now I feel like I've kind of stumbled into this world of privilege really, of real literary privilege. 

I mean, especially with being on the New York Times bestseller list, I feel a lot of responsibility to both acknowledge the privilege of that and then like steward it well for future projects. To not get kind of carried into like wherever the wind takes me, whatever projects are presented to me just to make money. And it's difficult as someone who is used to financial instability you know, to turn those projects down. But I've had to really kind of have people around me who are truth tellers to kind of snap me out of it when I'm like dazzled by different, you know, writing opportunities. I have an amazing, amazing agent currently who helps to really ground me and say, you know, that's not who you are.

You know, that project, that's just not who you are. And she said that to me the other day and I needed that. So having people around me that kind of don't let… I mean, it's good to explore…but don't let me drift out too far outside of myself, you know, has been really helpful. Yeah it feels big. I mean I'm so happy when I think about it. I'm like I can really write at least a few more books. I can, I can milk this thing for at least a few more, hopefully more than a few more books. I hope to just be a career writer. But, yeah, how lucky am I, honestly? 

Patrick: Well, it's not just luck. You mentioned craft, writing. I was just talking about this with a colleague around what does it mean to be a writer, like especially in this age of AI and all that. And I mean, the attention to craft and detail, your writing is beautiful. And I know that's not just an overnight thing. It's not magic. It's a lot of work. It's all those journals that you put together. So my last question, I ask everyone who comes on this show is, this call, this vocation you have to be a writer, how much of it comes from you, like your own sense of self, your connection with the divine and how much comes from your community?

And when I say community in my head, I just have this image of your grandmother's selection in that book of poetry standing next to your book. So how much comes from this family community that has nurtured this gift and call, and how much has come from you, from an internal desire? 

Cole: Yeah. It's such a beautiful question. Such a beautiful question, thanks for asking it. I mean, it's hard to distinguish because so much of my own sense of self is informed by like what I've inherited and the stories I've inherited. But I like to think that it's both. That, you know, if my father hadn't dreamed up a different way for me to be in the world, to be connected to other people and be connected to love, I don't know. I can't say if I would've found writing on my own and if I hadn't found that poem in that book by my grandmother, I don't know if I would have had the presence of self to keep writing. Knowing what I know about how, black women make it in literary world, I don't know if I would've had that courage. 

And so I definitely think it's a little bit of both. And I like to think, or at least I try to believe that there's a little bit of mystery to it. I try this practice of imagination for kind of ancestors who I've never met and don't even know their names, but this practice of imagination for…Toni Morrison talks about this, practicing imagination for their interior worlds, the interior worlds of her ancestors. She talks about this in The Source of Self-Regard. I've taken that up and started to have that same practice of imagination of, you know, what would it have looked like to be a writer. What would, if my great, great, great grandmother, you know, had the heart of an artist, what would that have looked like in her?

And knowing that artists, how we've survived for so long, I have little doubt that I come from artists. But in doing that, I think I have a little bit of… I hope a little bit of a like sacred humility in knowing that this probably doesn't originate with me. Like the origin is not me, but it's now my responsibility to steward it best I can with integrity for who I am. 

Patrick: Cole thank you so much. Thank you for being on the Sound of Genuine, for sharing your stories. It's such a gift. Your writing it is so incredible and I'm thinking of all those young people who may be in houses that don't have books. I hope that they can fill their homes, not just with your first book, This Here Flesh, but all the books that are yet to come Thank you. Thank you so much for leaning into your vocation, your calls as a writer.

Cole: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for this conversation and trusting me with your space.

Patrick: I want to thank you for listening to the Sound of the Genuine and Cole’s story. We know that you have a story to tell. There is the Sound of the Genuine in you, and we want to know about it. Head on over to fteleaders.org and subscribe to our newsletter. And in that subscription, you'll be able to tell us a little about yourself if you want to be a guest or if you've got some exciting news to share with the world. I want to thank our producers, Elsie Barnhart, Heather Wallace, and @siryalibeats for his music. We produce this podcast to help you find the Sound of the Genuine in you. And we hope that inspires you enough to come back and listen to another episode of the Sound of the Genuine.