"Run the run you can run"
an interview with poet & teacher, Cameron Barnett
Today, I’m excited to share an interview and writing prompt from poet and teacher, Cameron Barnett, which digs into his writing and mindfulness practices. I’d love your suggestions of other people I might feature here, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just reply to this newsletter. ✨
I’ve known and admired Cameron Barnett and his poems for years; he is a treasured part of the Pittsburgh literary world and I feel lucky to be in his orbit. I didn’t realize, though, until I started teaching high school, that in addition to writing damn good poems that have moved countless adult readers, and being a kind, brilliant human being—he has also transformed the way countless young people perceive poetry.
Let me explain: I teach high school English at Winchester Thurston and a huge number of my students come from Falk Laboratory School at Pitt, where Cameron teaches middle school English. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a poetry unit ready to do some persuasive jujitsu to reverse whatever negative associations students have about poetry, only to hear them say, “Oh, I actually like poetry. I had Mr. Barnett and he made it fun.”
Last year, our literary and art magazine, Plaid, hosted Cameron for a reading and writing workshop and the event was mobbed with many, many students who usually show up just for the cookies and slink out after the first few minutes. Cameron’s former students and the friends of his former students packed our library to hear him read, talk about his writing process, and lead them in writing prompts. They hung around after to have him sign their books and check in with him. I heard students talking later in the halls about poems he’d read rather than the latest Tiktok. It was incredible.
I highly recommend that you read both of Cameron’s books, The Drowning Boys’ Guide to Water, and Murmur (more info on these after the interview). Malcolm Friend names the power of his poetry beautifully in his blurb for Murmur, “Barnett knows which poems and the notes within them need to be belted at the top of his lungs, which are a smooth croon, and which need to be whispered—murmured, even. With these poems, he “invite[s you] up to the mic” with him, dares you to stand as his song vibrates through you, and see if the bass bumping through your bones doesn’t move you to join him in song.”
What is your writing practice like? Do you have any writing rituals?
My writing process looks different depending on the season. During the school year, it’s pretty sporadic. I might be lucky to get a couple poems written on a random weekend or within a class workshop with my students. Most of the time, I save my writing for the summer and do what I call a “Poetry Staycation.” I choose a week to visit a different coffee shop each day and spend the day reading a different book of poetry all the way through, stopping along the way to write based off something from the book or a prompt I’ve been meaning to try. I usually don’t allow myself to go back to those drafts until the end of the summer, and then I tinker with them after some time until they feel closer to what I’m hoping for. It’s a system I’ve kind of stumbled into but it works well for me.
What kind of writing are you working on?
Right now, I don’t have any specific project. I’m hoping to write my way forward…wherever that takes me. I’d love to find a next project in the future, but right now I’m really enjoying not having a project. A lot of my work has been toward a theme or book project, which is always fun, but I’m hoping to spend some time writing through a wide variety of things.
What helps you when you get stuck with your writing?
Reading, conversations, long walks, or even long showers. Anything that gets my mind in some sustained rhythm for a while The right book can do that for me, but more often I get through a rough patch of writing by having a really good conversation with someone that changes the language patterns I feel I’m stuck on, or a walk or run in the park that allows my brain to process things for a while. On the “production” side of this, though, sometimes it’s just a matter of playing around with what I’ve got, and moving things around on the page or in my syntax until something breaks free and I see a path forward with the work.
What are your mindfulness practices?
Running is a huge mindfulness practice for me. I’ve been a runner for about twelve years now, long enough to learn how my writing life and running life are two sides of the same coin. I could probably ramble about it for a long time, but to be brief: I think the way running allows me to be both very present with my physical body—its capacities and limitations—as well as how my mind works around whatever playlist I’m listening to or or the environmental sounds around my route, help me feel fully me. It’s strange, but I feel more like a human, and less like a someone just dealing with tasks, productivity, obligations, etc.
It’s cliché to say, but running is when I feel most free, and that time helps me be a better writer in tangible and intangible ways alike. The older I get, the more precious I find my free time to be, but I try to run at least once a week if not more (certainly if I’m training for a race, which I also love). Pittsburgh’s parks and neighborhood streets are great escapes for me in that regard.
Do you see your mindfulness practices related to any other work you do, such as teaching?
Running, through the lens of mindfulness, absolutely intersects with my teaching. The most obvious point is stamina. Teaching is hard—there’s no way around it. On a month-to-month level, all the way to minutes and seconds in the classroom with students, you have to find ways to persist and perform your best. You also have to know when to pause, rest, and reset. You have to know yourself, and respect yourself well enough, to act in those moments. You have to be able to do both.
I use the Nike Run Club app, and I’m a big fan of the guided audio runs by Coach Bennett. His tone and approach work so well for me, and he has a saying about running he often offers to summarize his points: “This is about running, and this is also not about running.” I’ve really adopted that for myself, and so running, writing, and teaching all share these binding threads for me around stamina, passion, persistence, creativity, but also rest, reflection, rejuvenation, and moderation.
Another quote of Bennett’s is “run the run you can run,” as opposed to forcing yourself to run the run you think you should run when your body tells you otherwise. For me, as a teacher, this is also about teaching the lesson you can teach (or the one the students need) rather than what you think you have to teach. And as a writer, it’s about writing the piece you can write at that moment, not the one you expect to write or that you think someone else will like.
What piece of wisdom do you have on a post-it note to remember?
I don’t have it literally written on a post-it note, but mentally I do…it’s the same quote as above: “Run the run you can run.” I just think it’s such a healthy approach to running, and as Coach Bennett says, a healthy approach to everything else that’s not running. The world and all its exterior motivating factors that we endure tend to demand more of us, the best of us, our perfection, etc., but only we have the power to grant ourselves the necessary grace and recalibration we deserve.
It’s like I tell writing students, younger and older, all the time: learn to love writing the shitty drafts because the good stuff is bound to come after it. And you may also realize the “shitty” draft (crappy, for the middle schoolers) is actually anything but that. When you’re a runner, you’re going to have some pretty crappy runs, but you don’t get to pick and choose when those show up. So all you can do is just run for the love of the sport and celebrate those great runs. And teachers know, not every lesson is a home run–but man, it’s electrifying for you and the students when that home run lesson does arrive.
Are there any books/authors/teachers/podcasts that have been transformative for you that you would recommend to readers?
I think it’s pretty popular, but the podcast Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam, is one of my favorites. It’s such a thoughtful, provocative, and wide-ranging podcast on psychology, which I love. It helps me understand things and look a things differently, sometimes even leading to ideas for poems. And a book I love is The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez, which both changed and confirmed so many notions I had about what a writing workshop could be or ought to be. I had the chance to model a graduate workshop after her model and it was one of the most enjoyable workshops I’ve ever been part of.
A prompt from Cameron
A lot of times, my prompts begin with making lists. So here’s my broad, general strategy:
Think of a half dozen different categories that are unrelated (e.g. games from your childhood, your top 5 favorite fruits, greetings or phrases you don’t use but find endearing when others do, people who meant a lot to you at some point in your life but who aren’t a part of it anymore for one reason or another, etc.)
Then what I do sometimes is take a small handful of those lists and use one of them as the inciting topic of the poem, then challenge myself to weave in one or more things from the other lists I’m working on.
Some people find this limiting to their writing—I feel the opposite, and often find a lot of opportunity and excitement in the challenge of finding a way to bridge disparate topics, themes, entities, whatever, into something that feels more cohesive.
About Murmur: The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”
For more from Cameron and his new book, Murmur🫀
You can watch Cameron read at his Launch party for Murmur here!
Listen to Cameron read his stunning poem, “Grandpa’s Gavel” at The Sun
Cameron Barnett is a poet and teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Murmur and The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water, winner of the Autumn House Press 2017 Rising Writer Contest, and finalist for the 49th NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Cameron graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School and received his BA in English from Duquesne University in 2011, where he was the recipient of the O’Donnell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He holds his MFA and MAT from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge Literary Magazine and co-coordinator of Pitt’s Speakeasy Reading Series. Cameron has also served as an editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Journal (since closed) and as Board Chair for Write Pittsburgh. He was the 2022-2024 Emerging Black Writer in Residence at Chatham University’s MFA program.
Cameron’s poetry explores the complexity of race and the body for Black Americans today. He is the recipient of a 2019 Investing in Professional Artists Grant Program as well as the 2019 Emerging Artist Awardee for the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Awards, both co-sponsored by The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments. He teaches middle school English language arts and social studies at his alma mater, Falk Laboratory School. You can follow him @cambarnett89.
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. If you have ideas to share for future newsletters, you can reply to this email or email me at emilymohnslate@gmail.com. You can support this newsletter by liking, commenting & sharing it with other people. You can also find me on Instagram or Facebook or find more info at my website. Thank you for reading!
Such a great interview! Adding his Post-It answer to my chorus of Post-Its! ❤️
This is beautiful ❤️ stay mindful ❤️