There are few pairings that, from afar, drip with more romance than those between two writers.
Some, like that between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, are remembered as much for envy and bickering as the symbiotic creative force of their relationship. Some, like the marriage of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, end with jealousy and affairs. Others, of course, flourish. When asked by a journalist whether her husband, the great Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, afflicted her own work, Elsa Morante disagreed. “No,” she told the reporter. “He has an identity. I have an identity. Basta.
To Harris’ surprise, McMillon called back with praise. He recalls the conversation easily. “I think that was the first time I ever cried in front of my son,” Harris recounted last August, from a writing studio he shares with Morrow in Lakewood. In a cream button-down, tied dreads and round Windsor glasses, Harris exudes equal measures of erudition and total chill. “I was just like—Yo! The fact that big publishers are expressing interest. From then on, it was a whirlwind, man.
A journey he’d elucidate in “Imperfect Brain,” one of Harris’ first poems that contextualized the link between his disability and writing. “I think I had a sensitivity to language,” Harris said, “because I was always told that I couldn’t use it. I was told that I wouldn’t be able to harness its utility.”
"As a kid, I used to imagine myself split into two halves, never whole, grappling with what it meant to be half-Black and half-white. When a boundary was crossed with my body at a young age, I imagined all the sensual energy in me splintered off into a foreign object, floating through the ether, traveling away from me indefinitely. After trying to hard to reclaim what I thought I’d lost, I feared the distance too great.
In the winter of 2022, around the same time “Colorway” was written, Morrow received a message from Harris. She was just familiarizing herself with Cleveland’s literary scene and had used Literary Cleveland as a starting hub. She found“Well, she was following me, and I followed her back, of course,” Harris said. He had looked up “Mariah Carey” and was enthralled. “I was like, ‘Who’s this poet?’ She’s from Ohio.
In early April, shortly after Harris turned 34, Harris and Morrow meet at Dunlap’s in Clark-Fulton for a variety show called Con Tú, for which Harris has been asked to read. What about writing is a lonely act? Hemingway, after all, said the writer is doomed to a life of isolation, even amidst the pretty guise of celebrity. Writing, especially poetry, is both a reconciliation with the spirit and an inner desire to be heard by a tuned-in audience. If writing is prayer, as Kafka once said, then it's a prayer to the unknowable. A poet rarely writes with a face in her mind’s eye.
Quartez Harris Kortney Morrow Arts Culture Feature News Feature
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