Reviews/Interviews Editor Ann Beman interviews Sean Enfield about holy american burnout!, an insightful collection of essays that threads his experiences as a Texan student and later as a first-year teacher of predominantly Muslim students at a North Texas middle school, weaving personal essay and cultural critique into the historical fabric of Black and bi-racial identity.

What incited you to write this book? Was there one essay or a group of them that ignited this project?

This book was kind of gradually incited. The first essay I wrote for it was back in 2014—that was “Paper Shackles” although I was calling it “The Middle Passage” then—but I didn’t have any drive toward an essay collection at that time or toward writing essays generally. That was just a story that I had been telling my friends as like a funny little anecdote, but eventually I needed to release it because the anecdote became less funny with each telling, and writing it down served as a way of preserving it in a way that was better for my psyche than letting it ramble out drunkenly at the bar. I wrote a few more essays in that regard—“Song of the South, Reprise,” was another of those—when I got to Fairbanks for my MFA, working with Daryl Farmer in his creative nonfiction workshop there, but again, I didn’t think there was a whole book there. “To Pimp a Mockingbird – A Lesson Plan” sort of solidified the gradual pull toward what would become holy american burnout! in that it brought the anxious teller of the previous essays into a place where the releasing of that one story didn’t settle, however temporarily, the compulsion to revisit that time of my life.

As with the story that became “Paper Shackles,” I would often tell anecdotes from that failed year of teaching middle school literature, and certainly, there was still some rawness around feeling like a bad educator with my students’ poor test results and subsequent firing. Writing “To Pimp a Mockingbird” allowed me to take some ownership of something I didn’t often linger on in telling teaching anecdotes: moments that I felt proud of. But it also spurred me to revisit that year in the broader context of all that was swirling around in the political atmosphere blocked out by the tunnel-vision required to get through a school year. The more essays about the classroom I wrote, the fuller the picture of exhaustion became, and it felt like there was a throughline between my own strange little artifact from my time as a 7th grader to the 7th graders I was briefly instructing and grading. 

You include an Author’s note in the table of contents of holy american burnout! You speak of a stylistic shift in the collection. I felt like the note itself was a moving mini essay. Can you speak about the development of the collection and this note?

I have to thank my editor, Lauren Westerfield, who is just absolutely wonderful to work with!, for encouraging the note on the table of contents. The practice of lowercasing the agents of state-sponsored violence, that the note attempts to describe, was initially only employed in the central essay, “All My Niggas Was white – Notes from the Color Line,” but when I started to compile the essays together, it felt inadequate to isolate that practice in one piece and keep everything else the same. And so, before submitting the manuscript in the round of querying in which Split/Lip Press graciously took it on, I went through and tried to stretch that practice across the entire manuscript which, now that the book is out I can confess, I did so quite haphazardly! It is not easy to make that big of a stylistic shift, on your own, across an entire manuscript, especially one that asks you to then interrogate the who and why of which so-called proper nouns to reduce. 

In talking with Lauren, we developed more intentionality around the practice spilling out of one essay into the rest of the manuscript. Lauren helped me to realize a shift that had been there the whole time, but not one I would have identified on my own. I had already conceived of structuring the collection around the “roller coaster” chart that is used to make sense of the chaos that is a person’s first year teaching: it moves from Anticipation down to Survival further down to Disillusionment back up to Rejuvenation then to Reflection and back to Anticipation. Well, “All My Niggas Was white” fell right at the gulf of disillusionment in my schema, and so it further signified that movement to wrestle some of that, albeit small, power in the moment of rage and exhaustion with our state of violence. The next couple essays after that really engage with that question of what we do with our rage toward systems built to immolate us into more fuel for more furnaces, and so that move provided a little strength where strength felt futile. Then, to let it carry over into the “up-swing,” if we can all it that, made it feel even more deliberate, and forced us to really question the language—and subsequently power—in a way that energized the manuscript for me. 

I never wanted to use that note as means of justifying the shift or even explaining it really, but more to give the urgency to the practice that I felt, but was hard to translate on the page. That note really did come to feel like the “first” essay of the collection to me; it unified the broader metaphor I wanted to get at with my own lived experiences of burnout in a way that just making the change wouldn’t have done. And it wouldn’t exist without a brilliant editor! Thank you, Lauren!     

In the opening essay, “To Pimp a Mockingbird–A Lesson Plan,” you talk about wanting to combine “your two messiahs—hip-hop and literature.” In creating a lesson plan for the middle schoolers, you wanted to give that lesson plan a beat. How is beat an antidote to burnout?

First, lemme say that I love “beat [as] an antidote to burnout” just as a phrase, so thank you for that!

So much of the burnout dealt with in this collection, and in my lived experiences, stems from a frenzy of responsibility and stress and information—the dizzying effect of which manifests, for me, in bodily fatigue and mental anxiety—and certainly, music has been a great steadying force when everything starts to feel like too much. I am always finding ways to bring music into the classroom for precisely the reason that I find that rhythm, melody, harmony, all these things distill those exhaustive forces into a container that makes a kind of sense of them. This is also why I try to make an effort to carve out time to listen to music where I’m just spending time with the album—which playing a song in the classroom also affords too—and not using it to background some chore, work, or other activity. In a world where we are meant to hold far more burdens than we have capacity for, I think grounding ourselves in those beats that run counter to the chaos of everything else can certainly soothe the tensing muscles and steady the turbulent thoughts. 

In the essay, I joke that I just “wanna pimp the mockingbird,” just trying to make a boring lesson more hip for students who weren’t vibing with it, but I do earnestly believe that music is one of the best tools we’ve got in combating the apathy that also comes from the barrage of america’s demands on our bodies and minds. And so, I may not always know what music will actually be perceived as cool in my classrooms, but damn it! Imma keep tryna give my lessons beats because, to me, the worst side effect of burnout is when it gets us to stop caring.  

In that opening essay, you also say that you’re a musician. Can you talk about your music? 

Sure! I say musician in the essay, but I should maybe say bassist since I can really only confidently play the bass. But I’ve been doing that since I was around 12 years old when my parents bought me a cheap bass from a pawn shop so that I could start a garage band with a couple of my friends. Music has always been a very social art form for me—writing too but music more concretely in that several of my closest friendships have emerged through playing music together. 

I started playing music in a garage band with a couple friends from high school, and I played the bass and wrote the lyrics. Which was exactly the same role I had in the punk band I played in with a couple different friends in college. Musically, I think the songs I’ve helped to write always end up all over the place sonically and in the writing. I have been fortunate to make music with dear friends in all the projects I’ve leant my bass tones to, and there’s often this kind of Frankenstein approach to the writing where we trust each other to stitch together the various components of a song we bring into the room, components that don’t seem like they’ll fit initially but eventually come together. 

You’re also a poet. How does poetry inform your prose? How does music inform your poetry? 

I think I work best when I am writing poetry, prose, music simultaneously rather than focusing on one particular project at a time. That sometimes jumbles up what I am working, but I think that bleeding over the creative margins is good for me. I am always trying stuff out and never know what’s going to stick in what form, and so it helps me to be able to try something as an essay and then realize it might work better if I stripped it down and turned it into a poem or vice versa. 

Form, I think, is maybe the biggest way that the poetry spills into the prose. Poetry allows me to visualize a piece of writing in a way that is very generative to me, and so trying different ideas in formal poetry is often a springboard for more poems or for the essays too. There are a few essays in the collection, in fact, that I originally started as poems. “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense”—which is maybe still just a long poem?—I initially attempted as an epistolary poem, so it did already have prose quality to it in early drafts, but the form was much different. Starting with the epistle though made the addressing of the piece more concrete for me, so that even when I abandoned the epistolary form, and broke into the chart that’s in the collection, I could still visualize where it needed to start and the progression that a letter might demand on the piece’s trajectory. 

I’m also always cannibalizing my own work just generally. So even though the song lyrics I write rarely look or feel like the poetry I write, I’ll often pluck a lyric from a song that isn’t quite working and try it as the start to a poem, or likewise, I’ve stolen lines of poetry and just dropped them into the start of an essay or as a bridge in a part of an essay in which I’ve gotten stuck. Like I said, it can be a little messy of a process, but it’s worked for me so far. I am very much a magpie at the writing desk, and some of the trinkets I pile up just so happen to be of my own making. 

I love a heart-rending flash essay. “The Drop Off” is one of my favorite pieces for that reason. It’s so beautifully and effectively layered. Did it start as a poem?

Actually, “The Drop Off” started as a Facebook post. Which is strange to admit, but true! It’s not something I talk about directly in the collection, but during that first year of teaching, I was using my Facebook as a public space for journaling as a way to release some of the frustrations and tensions of the day. I was writing these long, drawn out posts that I’m surprised anybody read. Most of those I probably would’ve lost or forgotten about, but my dear friend Leo Martin, who is a librarian at the University of Houston now, compiled some of those posts into an artbook he was making as a part of a bookmaking course he took during his MLIS program. I am very undisciplined when it comes to keeping a real journal, so it was fortunate that we had made this weird little art book together because it helped remind me of some of the stories that I would develop into the essays in this collection.

“The Drop Off” is the only piece I kind of just “adapted” straight from the original post because it felt right to preserve that moment in amber, so most of the “writing” of that piece was just expanding upon what I had already given myself and threading some of the more loosely thrown out thoughts in the original post in way that felt more intentional.

I talked a bit already about the long gaps between a few of the early pieces I wrote for the collection, and I rarely wrote any of these essays in here in direct succession, but I excavated the text that would become “The Drop Off” right after I had finished an early draft of “To Be (or not to be) in a Rage Almost All the Time.” That piece had been a particularly draining one to write both in time spent drafting it and in the places it had me go emotionally, and so “The Drop Off” functioned as a sibling to that essay in that it was always going to remain a flash piece, not a sprawling thirty page behemoth, but it also explored a similar kind of collapsing of the distance between my childhood self and my students by way of the development of our understanding of the world. It did so in a way that was less mired in the anger necessitated by the political awakening tracked in “To Be…,” but focused on the thrill of finding one’s imagination as a child which emerged in the adapting of the original post. I liked the spark it provided in order to carry on with the reminder that for whatever pain I had to unearth to finish this collection, there was also a wealth of tenderness and joy there too.

There are essays in the collection dedicated to punk, Prince, and Frank Ocean. Do you listen to music when you write? 

I do! Not always but more often than not I have music on in the background when I’m writing. And I don’t always limit myself to instrumental music when I’m writing either, although sometimes I need something wordless in order to help me focus (focusing is something I struggle with), but I also like to curate music that best soundtracks the piece I’m working on. So, in writing the “Frank Ocean” essay, I had a playlist of Frank Ocean songs on in the background; same with the Prince essay; and with the “God Is a Moshpit” essay I was really into the band Special Interest so I was listening to them a lot in the writing of that essay but also a lot of other of my favorite punk bands, Bad Brains, Sleater-Kinney, Titus Andronicus, Fugazi, on and on, as well.  

Is there a HAB! playlist? 

Weirdly enough, there isn’t! Not explicitly. I certainly have a lot of mini-playlists I made to work on individual essays, but nothing for the whole collection. I was asked if there was a theme song for holy american burnout! by the Split/Lip marketing team, but my answer was too long to actually run for the series it was meant for (by this point of the interview that obviously makes sense!). Still, I was proud of the song I cobbled together, and it probably wouldn’t actually work as a song if someone were to actually mashup what I’ve listed so maybe it works better as a lil mini playlist:

The verses of “Futura Free” by Frank Ocean 

with a chorus/refrain mashup of “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar and “Mississippi Goddamn” by Nina Simone 

on a beat built on samples of the bass line from “Journey in Satchidananda” by Alice Coltrane and the drumbeat from “Sign o’ the Times” by Prince

How do you feel about the word ‘Americana’? Actually, we lowercase our title, the museum of americana. I’m guessing you might, too. What’s your definition of americana and how does HAB! fit into that definition?

I’m sure, like many, I think of the genre of music when I think of americana which I have a complicated relationship with. There are a great deal of artists that I love that are given that label of americana, but it’s often a particular kind of white and masculine artist that falls under that category. americana, to me, seems to denote a nostalgia for americas—different americas depending on who’s doing the telling—lost to time and history, not always positive but maybe always yearning? I think if I were to fit holy american burnout! into that definition, then, it would be an artifact of yearning for an america not lost but never realized (and likely never could be). 

In “Song of the South, Reprise,” an essay near and dear to me, you say, “No future can emerge from a nostalgic past, from an America once considered ‘great,’ only a ceaseless and consumptive burning.” This strikes me as key to the collection, but also key to the question about ‘americana.’ Could a brick-and-mortar museum of americana exist without nostalgia? What might it look like?

I moved to milwaukee last year which is home to the Black Holocaust Museum. Regrettably, I’ve yet to have a chance to visit the museum, but I am very intrigued by its project to illuminate the legacies of the Black Holocaust—which, for the museum, begins with slavery but does not end with emancipation or with the striking down of jim crow laws but is, in fact, ongoing. A museum that looks at a conflicted past with an eye toward its effect on the present and continued shaping of the future seems like one way to stave off the pernicious elements of nostalgia. That is the project of many Jewish Holocaust memorial sites as well as the Hiroshima memorial. And also at the core of Clint Smith’s incredible nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed.

Still, as y’all note in y’all’s mission, that there is a great deal to celebrate in american culture that is not divorced from america’s violence but also not reproductive of it. And I do think alongside our condemnation of past and present evils, we have to hold up something like kindness or grace because, if not, what kind of future society are we saying we want if it’s all built on penance. Still, the skeptic in me doesn’t believe that any one physical space could hold the many contradictions that comprise american history and culture; it seems like it’d be the american history version of Borges’ “Library of Babel” in that it’s attempts to reconcile everything would make it functionally inert. However, the many questions that emerge from what y’all are doing at museum of americana and what the Black Holocaust Museum attempts to name and many other artists pose in their work, I hope, can continue to interrogate this country somewhere away from the violence of empire with a memory of those who have suffered at the hands of that empire while uplifting those revolutionary spirits that continue to work against the grinding gears of this country. 

In “The Revolution Will Be Revised,” you say you liked to write initial drafts by typewriter. Do you still do this? If so, why? If not, how has your process changed? Do you still have a typewriter?

I don’t anymore, and for a mostly boring reason… I left my typewriters in Alaska because I didn’t have room for them in my car when I moved to Milwaukee for the PhD. And I haven’t had the funds to replace them and can’t retrieve my old models for a variety of reasons.

I still believe in the process of translating across physical and digital mediums in the drafting process, but right now, it’s a little more haphazard than producing a typewritten (or, when I was in high school and the early days of college, I would write by hand) draft, and then taking that to my computer. Sometimes, now, I’ll just scrawl a few ideas in a notebook, or even just in my phone notes, and use those as a jumping point for a longer piece. For me, it’s mostly just about engaging my thinking in a variety of different ways for whatever I’m working on so that I can kind of stir myself out of falling into just one definitive thought pattern. Typewriting first was one way I found to do that because it was much more tactile and slower than writing directly into Word. Working across genre is another way I’ve tried. I’m always searching for ways to shake up the routine. 

All that being said, I would like to get a typewriter again here soon! I liked just having them around even when I wasn’t working on them.

Do you have projects in the works? What are you working on now?

I always have projects in theory, but right now, nothing that’s more than ideas circling around in my head, searching for the words to release them. Mostly, I’ve been writing a few poems here and there that are maybe, maybe not, building toward a longer project, but I’m giving myself the space to just kind of write without any sort of endgame. I have had to lend myself some grace in this though because I have certainly felt the pressure—self-imposed—to try to follow-up on the collection as soon as possible, but I am tired and that is a very productivity-oriented mindset that I want to resist. I certainly hope that I have more to say, but I also have to trust that with rest and reading the words will come.

Sean Enfield is an essayist, poet, gardener, bassist, and educator from Dallas, TX. His writing attempts to find connection through music and words as reclamation of labor, as community care, and as resistance to the many forces of white supremacy working against marginalized bodies. You can find his work at seanenfield.com.