Bryant O'Hara and Edward Hall

[00:06] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: My name is Edward Austin Hall My age is 59. Today's date is November 17, 2020. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and my partner today is Bryant O'Hara, and he is my friend, colleague, and fellow poet.

[00:26] BRYANT O'HARA: And my name is Bryant O'Hara. My age is 50. Today's date is November 17, 2020. I'm in stone Mountain, Georgia. My partner today is Edward Hall and he is my colleague, friend, and fellow poet.

[00:46] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: We are under threat of intervention by our moderator. So I have to ask you remember your furliest encounter, your earliest encounter with the works of H.P. lovecraft? Brian?

[01:03] BRYANT O'HARA: Yes. My first work that I actually, that really kind of. Kind of hit me was at a. It was at a science fiction convention, and it was in the. I think it was in the early 90s, I believe. I hadn't been back home very long, and it was off of. It was actually not far from where I lived, but it was kind of. It wasn't in downtown. It was actually in Decatur. It was a place called. I think it was called Summer Fun. So they actually had a reading of one of Lovecraft's works from the Atlanta Radio Theater Company. So. So the first time I heard it, Lovecraft was live. Yeah.

[02:04] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Were they doing Walls by chance? I know they did that one.

[02:08] BRYANT O'HARA: It might. I don't think. I mean, I bought a recording of Rats in the Walls done by. That actually was done by Harlan Ellison. So, yeah, that was. That was a wonderful recording. But I'm trying to remember whether it was. It might have been a different rendition of Rats in the Walls or one of the other works. But it was definitely. That was the first time I'd heard one of one of Lovecraft's works. And I was. I was utterly fascinated by it at this point. So. And after I bought the tape, and it was a tape. It was a cassette, I found out that the Atlanta Radio Theater Company had done several of these recordings of Lovecraft stories. And at the time, they were also meeting relatively close to. Well, actually, they were meeting in Avondale. They had it. Well, they would perform in Avondale, which was again, not very far from where I lived.

[03:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Not the old theater, the old cinema.

[03:18] BRYANT O'HARA: Not the old cinema. It was behind it. Okay, this is a little bit later. I think this is at this point. I think it was probably early around the 2000s. Yeah. But, yeah, they were. They had a. There was a theater space behind, like, the main drag for Avondale, and they did several performances there that I went to. I took a couple of friends of mine to when Jack, my youngest Son was old enough, I took him to a couple. So. Yeah, and every time. Yeah, pretty much once I really discovered them. And I also found out that they would read at Dragon Con every year. I made sure to listen to whatever it was they were performing. And I now own like four or five of their works. Not all of them Lovecraft related, but all of them very well done. So that's when I started kind of diving into the rabbit hole. Yeah.

[04:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And do you remember when you started seeing pushback about Lovecraft and his attitudes?

[04:36] BRYANT O'HARA: That was probably. And I can, I know I can kind of estimate it because there was. I think I was hearing pushback more actually. I think the first time I really kind of recognized that there was some pushback was after my anniversary, my 20 year anniversary, that was 2016, I believe. And I think during that period we did a big. My wife and I did a big tour of New England, actually in other parts of the US and we made it a point to go to Providence. And so I know it was after that. So probably, yeah, maybe like a year or two after that as I started really kind of getting more and more into his works. Eventually I found folks who were talking about actually kind of racist. And my reaction at first was I had to think about it for a bit, you know, basically decide how big of a dog I wanted to put in this fight about his status in literature. You know, my own opinions of his work versus my opinions of him as a person. And I had, I mean, and I read the works that were considered really problematic and including the fairly infamous poem that I don't think I can. Who.

[06:20] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Like the Language of Mordor unuttered here.

[06:23] BRYANT O'HARA: Yes. So that, I mean, and I, and I mean, I did read it. I showed it to my son at the time and we both kind of. We had a conversation about it because, you know, my youngest son, Jack is. He's an English major, so he's very much into literature as well. And so, you know, we had a conversation about, you know, our, our stances on him, and I think we came. The conclusion, I kind of came to was that, yes, I do, I do have a dog in the fight, but the fact of the matter is, one, the author is dead, so he's not benefiting from anything being said now. And two, his works, most of his works are in the public domain, so I'm more than free to pick his literary bones. So I take the stance that I understand where he was coming from. I do appreciate the stories. I get something out of him that I find Useful and his flaws that come through either in his literature or him as a person. Person. I choose to keep separate.

[07:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay. You made reference to your wife. Tell us your wife's name.

[08:05] BRYANT O'HARA: My wife is Alice Gordon.

[08:07] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Huh. And y'all got married in. Let me do the math. 1996. Yep.

[08:15] BRYANT O'HARA: Yep.

[08:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Where was that?

[08:17] BRYANT O'HARA: We actually got married in Decatur.

[08:19] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Mm.

[08:20] BRYANT O'HARA: In Decatur, Georgia. At the. At the time. Actually might still be the time. The. It's currently the. The Friends meeting house. Oh, on DeKalb Avenue. On DeKalb.

[08:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, you know, it's actually not DeKalb Avenue there. It's Howard. It's Howard, you there?

[08:38] BRYANT O'HARA: Right, right.

[08:39] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I used to live. I actually lived at that house the other side of the. In that house, the other end of the parking lot of the Friends.

[08:49] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah.

[08:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And it was. Oh, my gosh, one of the worst rental situations I was ever in in my life. Lovecraft story out. Yeah.

[09:01] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, that was a. It was a fun time. I actually wasn't part of the Friends group. I was actually. There was actually another religious group meeting there that was the Unitarian Universalist at the time.

[09:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, that's. Yeah, that was the connection. I thought you were going to say Universal. Unitarian Universalist space, which I guess technically it was. So now, were y'all active in that congregation?

[09:33] BRYANT O'HARA: I was. Alice was not. Yeah. I. I joined because I was kind of looking for. Like I said, I was looking for some form of coral group.

[09:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[09:46] BRYANT O'HARA: And I went there. I did go to the UU church that was actually, I think, off of Briarcliff. That was a little further north. Indicator. Yeah. I went to, like, one or two of theirs, and I did. I liked them. I like the organization, but I didn't feel I could, like, drive or take the bus all the way out there on a regular basis.

[10:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Got it.

[10:12] BRYANT O'HARA: For the choral performances.

[10:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[10:15] BRYANT O'HARA: But there was this other group which was the. Their official name was the Thurman Hamer Ellington Unitarian Universalist Church, or the. And it was basically a Unitarian church that had a deliberately Afrocentric spin. The person. The reverend who founded it actually was. I think he was actually African royalty. I can't remember where, but yeah. And they had a percussion choir, which was like a. Basically a whole drum choir.

[10:53] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Wow.

[10:54] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah. They were doing. They did African percussion, and that's where things really picked up for me in terms of learning more, getting better at rhythm, and incorporating it more into my work.

[11:09] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. What. What instrument or instruments were you playing?

[11:14] BRYANT O'HARA: I played. There was one. I played one instrument. Basically, it was the equivalent of the bass drum called June. June basically was a big bass drum with a cowbell on it, so. Ah, yeah, I got to do drum and cowbell now.

[11:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Are you still involved in that congregation?

[11:35] BRYANT O'HARA: No, actually, I was only in it for maybe, like, you know, a couple of years. I think I wound up leaving about, like, a year or so after I got married.

[11:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. And. And how did you and Alice meet?

[11:51] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, we met at a writers group. There was a one.

[11:57] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Did it have a name?

[11:58] BRYANT O'HARA: I think it was a. Trying to remember. It was a Georgia writers group. They used. They met at the. It was at a. I think it was at a Barnes and Noble off of near Far Road. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[12:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: The Buckhead Barnes and Noble.

[12:16] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's. That's. I think that's where they. Where they met, I mean. And so I was. Again, I was kind of looking around for other writers groups as well. So I joined Club Koomba first, but I wanted to kind of make sure I kind of had my. It broadened my horizon. So I was trying to look for other groups as well. And that was one group that was meeting, so we joined there. And I think it was getting late one day, and during one of the meetings, and I kind of just hung out with Alice and a couple of her friends, and I realized, man, it's getting pretty late, and she offered to drive me home. So, yeah, it just kind of continued from there.

[13:01] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: There you go. And then y'all have how many children?

[13:05] BRYANT O'HARA: We have one that's by. By her and me. The total we have is seven.

[13:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Impressive.

[13:15] BRYANT O'HARA: Yep. So she actually adopted several children, one from one she adopted from India. And there were. Let's see, one she had, you know, with another person, and there were. Yeah, three that were from a family in Mexico. Oaxaca, Mexico. And eventually one of their cousins I wound up adopting. So. Yeah, I think I got the number right. Yeah, seven.

[14:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So to circle back around, it's your anniversary. Y'all went to Providence. Did you visit Lovecraft's grave?

[14:11] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, we did there. Yep. We. It was a very tiny grave. Yeah, there's no. There was no, like, huge, you know, monolith or anything like that. It was a fairly small thing, I want to say.

[14:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I. I want to say my recollection is that he died fairly impoverished, so.

[14:28] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[14:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, he did, you know, which I think is probably a little startling, given his reputation now and the fact that you can. It's hard to walk into a bookstore and any bookstore anywhere and have there be, like, no Lovecraft volume in there anywhere, unless it's you know, a used store where there's, you know, just really narrow sort of selection.

[15:00] BRYANT O'HARA: Oh, yeah, yeah. I. It's. Yeah, it is surprising. I mean, and I really was a bit shocked when I saw that, you know, they're. There are like. There's like a little monument, maybe little monuments here and there to him. But, you know, in terms of the rest of the city, he's. Yeah, he's there. They know him. Yeah, they actually. Actually the funny story, we were. We were actually, you know, taking a picture, you know, by the tombstone, and I think the groundskeeper was basically trying to kind of shoo us away from that because they. I guess they kind of don't want the site getting all trampled and everything. But I mean, it was funny. We took the picture anyway, so. Yeah, we got it before the guy got there.

[15:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, well. So, yeah. I was unaware of your interest in Lovecraft until you sent me a. An audio project. Speaking of picking his bones, you remember the thing that you sent me and asked me if I'd be. If I would listen to it and I. And I remember trying, and I was like, this is way too down to Lovecraft. Rabbit hole for me.

[16:23] BRYANT O'HARA: Yes, it was.

[16:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Remind me what that project was.

[16:28] BRYANT O'HARA: It was basically taking, you know, Lovecraft wrote a. A collection of poems. I think they were sonnet form called the Fungi from Yugos.

[16:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[16:41] BRYANT O'HARA: And I think there was maybe. I think there were over 30.

[16:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[16:45] BRYANT O'HARA: Somewhere between 30 and 40, I think, under 40s. Separate poems. And what I wanted to do was basically set them to music and basically do some form of audio processing.

[17:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[17:03] BRYANT O'HARA: While I was doing it. So this was a project that was kind of an exercise, you know, not just of my. My interest in Lovecraft, but it was also a way for me to kind of exercise my interest in doing programming and typically, you know, programming with sound. So it was, it was interesting. And yeah, I mean, in looking back on it, it was. It was a lot of effort and there were. There were quite a few things that could have been done better in terms of audio quality and probably even creatively, but I enjoyed doing it. It was, it was, it was. It was quite fun being able to kind of essentially take the words from the. The author and put a. Put a soundscape underneath them. So, yeah, quite. Quite the challenge.

[18:07] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Have you tried that with other. Other works in the public domain or. I mean, I know you've got your own material coming.

[18:16] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[18:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: But I'm just, I'm curious about other. Other stuff that you might. Might have approached in A similar fashion.

[18:23] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, I did a couple actually. The first ones I tried were actually way more experimental than the fungi from Yuga. The. Among the first two were two poems by William Blake and it was the. The Tiger and the Lamb.

[18:44] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Uh huh. I'm listening. Yep, go ahead.

[18:48] BRYANT O'HARA: And the. What made those, you know, really very different from the yoga ones was that I was experimenting with a thing called singing synthesis, which is not just, you know, regular speech synthesis, but actually translating text at. To sung speech as opposed to just regular spoken speech.

[19:20] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Without actual voices.

[19:22] BRYANT O'HARA: Without actual voices. It was basically like a bunch of robots singing.

[19:27] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I was gonna say. Okay, so tell me more.

[19:31] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, it was quite a lot of work because it's one. I kind of had to have an idea of a rhythm and melody.

[19:39] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[19:41] BRYANT O'HARA: And then I created like four part harmony. So basically four parts. And then, you know, try to make the voices a little bit into them a little bit different. So what I couldn't make up for in terms of the difference in the voices, I made up for with, you know, changing their melodies in each of the parts. Parts.

[20:03] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay.

[20:04] BRYANT O'HARA: So it was basically it was me trying to do my acapella stuff instead of with humans, do them with computer programs.

[20:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[20:17] BRYANT O'HARA: So that was. Those two were the first. And I did do a. I did do one for Yates, the Second Coming that didn't involve as much computer driven stuff, but there was a lot of, you know, playing around with audio. And the last one I did was the hollow man from T.S. eliot and that was all computer generated. So yeah, that, that was quite fun gonna say.

[20:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And which of these made you happiest?

[20:55] BRYANT O'HARA: Honestly, The Hollow Man, I can tell.

[20:58] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: From your expression, I think.

[21:00] BRYANT O'HARA: Oh yeah, well, it was a one. After hearing, you know, Marlon Brando recite the Hollow man you mentioned. I. I spent like my last year in college trying to compose an adaptation for at least the first. The first part of the Hollow Men. And I got to. That was the only thing I'd done. I got to the first part and then basically let it lie for good lord several years. I mean, I think it's almost. It was almost 20 years before I got back to it.

[21:41] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Wow.

[21:43] BRYANT O'HARA: But by that time I felt like I had the programming chops to kind of do what I really wanted to do. And I had an idea of where I wanted it to go musically. So it's like, okay, I'm just going to do this now. I'm not sure the Hollow man is in the public domain yet.

[22:01] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I have to believe it's not. But.

[22:04] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, but it's coming up soon, so when it is, I'll probably try to essentially re. Release it.

[22:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: There you go.

[22:13] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[22:18] SPEAKER C: Can I ask a question, Brian? Will you talk to Ed about. You mentioned in other conversations about, you know, the. You're developing your voice, you come to Atlanta, you're kind of moving in this. You kind of alluded to this weird direction. Like you're. The weird science fiction direction. Is that related to the encounter with Lovecraft or like, how. What do you gain from Lovecraft? When do. When does. When do you start going weird and stuff like that?

[22:48] BRYANT O'HARA: Actually, I think the. When I wound up kind of going weird was probably the early, not probably the Latter Part of 93, 94, where. And it wasn't at that point, it wasn't really Lovecraft directly. I think once I kind of latched onto Lovecraft, I realized that, okay, I guess I'm riding in the backseat with this guy. But at the time, what I was. I was kind of taking all these other literary influences and trying to find a way to shoehorn that into what I was hearing at the time and what I thought about what I was hearing at the time. And I kind of. That. To really kind of explain the weirdness part, I kind of have to go back a little bit to a reference I made to my own demons when I, When I was in school. Actually let me go further back. Having been born in 1970, as you guys probably know, that was a very strange and yet very open, well, open and closed period in American history, especially even for African Americans. I mean, my dad was a Marine. My mom was a housewife, and we lived on a military base in the middle of Albany, Georgia. And most the vast majority of our neighbors were. Were white. But the. Because of the. Because this military base was a very controlled environment, you know, that was very, very stringent on, you know, codes of conduct. I never really felt that anybody was really giving me any grief. I mean, as a kid, you just. You don't see it. And there was like one time when somebody, an adult had asked me whether somebody. Something that someone had said, was it. Did they. Did they say anything that sounded weird, that sounded offensive? And I was like, I don't understand what you're saying. You know, it's the funny thing about racism. You have to have it explained to you, I think. But, you know, by the time I left the. Once I left Albany and eventually made my way to Decatur, I began to feel this very kind of disturbing isolation. And it was kind of happening not so much from. I felt like it was happening not so much from the white part of Decatur.

[25:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[25:56] BRYANT O'HARA: And it was mainly because it started when I first went to Renfro Middle School. I got tested to be an advanced placement, and I think there was a little bit of an attempt to kind of discourage me from doing that. And both my mom and I insisted, like, no, I'm going to school to learn. This is the best way to learn. I want the challenge. And I found that my classmates in the class, most of the classes that I went to that were Advanced placement, they were fun. I got along with pretty much everybody. But the more general ones, I think a lot of the kids were not particularly friendly because they didn't see me most of the time unless I was in, like, PE or shop or something like that. So I think there was, you know, there was. There was a. There was a lot of. A lot of pushback, I guess. Good bit of bullying. And at the time, I was also, you know, very much an advocate of nonviolence. So even though I would, you know, people would try to bully me, but I would not respond and I wouldn't fight back. So it's something that I thought of as a strength was to your average middle schooler, or even high school, are considered a sign of weakness. And it persisted through high school. And what made it even worse was, you know, growing up, it got kind of hard. Especially, you know, once puberty starts kicking in and you're wanting to, you know, to actually, you know, do things like date and hang out with the opposite sex. It gets a lot harder when you don't see most of those folks in your regular schooling, and the ones you do see don't live anywhere near you. And I think even in Decatur, which we now think of as this sort of very liberal bastion, there was still some degree of separation. You know, not like hardcore, you know, Jim Crow, like segregation, but it was segregation by choice, de facto.

[28:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: What year are we talking about again?

[28:31] BRYANT O'HARA: Years from. Well, my high school years was 84 to 88, so middle school was basically 83. 83 to 88. So the one. There was one particular incident that really kind of cemented it for me, and that was one where I was in a political science class, and we were getting ready to line up for. It was like the last class for the day. And as we were lining up, getting ready to go, I kind of. I stuck my head out the door, and I could see the class opposite me, and the class started panting. Traitor.

[29:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Really?

[29:17] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. And what I couldn't. There's nothing I Could really do. I mean, none of my friends. I don't think any of my classmates, except maybe one or two, the other one or two black people in the class understood what was happening. I recall being a combination of quite sad and incredibly angry.

[29:43] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So who was doing this? Exactly. These were black classmates.

[29:47] BRYANT O'HARA: These are black classmates.

[29:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: White classmates.

[29:50] BRYANT O'HARA: No, the black classmates were the ones chanting traitor.

[29:53] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's what I thought.

[29:54] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[29:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And these were people that you. You just, again, you had not a lot of direct interaction with because of your class, because of your educational trap. Right, yeah.

[30:08] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[30:09] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: This sounds familiar. So.

[30:11] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, yeah. So I spent most of my time at. I didn't hang out with most people, so I spent a lot of my high school years at the library and at bookstores. So, yeah, that was. That was a thing that had gone on for quite a number of years. And during that period, when it. When it came time for me to choose where I was going to go to school, that's when I said, you know what? I'm going either south or west. I'm not going into the south. And that was a good thing for me to do because it allowed me to kind of. It gave me time to kind of be who I wanted to be without having to deal with that drag of having to adhere to somebody's idea of what a black person should be.

[31:06] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[31:07] BRYANT O'HARA: But when I kept. When it was time, when I felt it was time to come back, I was coming back as somebody who had a little bit more sense of self, but still needed to figure out how to relate to everybody else around me.

[31:23] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[31:24] BRYANT O'HARA: So when I was in clubcomb, the first poems I read had. They weren't really clicking with any of the people that I was with. And it wasn't until I started to latch onto science fiction and particularly Parliament and Earth, Wind and Fire, that I began to realize, okay, I could do this through the culture that I am familiar with, but felt kind of isolated, kind of distance from, and kind of use that to kind of work my way back into on my own terms. Yes. So I started creating these characters and these scenarios that were kind of. That spoke to some of the issues, but not in a way that most people were kind of used to seeing, hearing them spoken from. So the idea of things like, you know, a certain. A certain musical diva as Mechagodzilla.

[32:31] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[32:33] BRYANT O'HARA: You know, people want. They got that. They understood what I was talking about. And some of them even got the Godzilla references.

[32:41] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: This is Mariah Pariah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good poem.

[32:47] BRYANT O'HARA: Thanks. So, yeah, it's from there, I was kind of. This was my way of having that dialogue on my own terms with people who were more willing to listen. Because given that, you know, this. The environment of Club Kaumu was a literary environment, so the people there, you know, they weren't going to. They wanted to hear what I thought, which was a big difference from, you know, being in a high school where nobody really cares what you think. So, yeah, in the process of doing that, I. I did wind up addressing quite a few of those demons and felt more and more comfortable. I still had some other ones to deal with because coming back to my marriage, that was a different set of demons to deal with. That was. Those were much more personal. Being that my wife Alice is Jewish, I did get some pushback from family members.

[33:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[33:55] BRYANT O'HARA: And I had to actually tell quite a few of them where to get off, including my own mother and father, I love very much. But I had to just kind of have that conversation with them and say, this is how this is going to be. So.

[34:12] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[34:14] BRYANT O'HARA: But that, yeah, coming back was definitely key for. To me as a poet and as a person and in the. As I again, wound up doing these sort of absurd, tangential takes on, you know, key things in black culture with, you know, my own interest in science fiction and taking it in different directions. You know, again, once Lovecraft kind of came into the picture, it was like, oh, okay, well, I see. I'm basically. I said, I'm kind of riding in the same car with this. With this person.

[34:57] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[34:58] BRYANT O'HARA: Kind of. Why I. Even though much of who he is and some of what he wrote is problematic, I kind of look at it like this. Both of us, as authors are trying to. We have some common points. We're not the things that we kind of think are the. Are kind of common or is this the cosmic indifference of the universe? How scary that is to some people.

[35:32] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[35:33] BRYANT O'HARA: Unknowable. It is to a lot of us, really. And how people choose to deal with that and that. On that, I think we do differ. Whereas Lovecraft is. His primary response is madness.

[35:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Oh, gee, yeah. Have we talked about that?

[35:54] BRYANT O'HARA: Can we talk about that specifically some parts? Yeah, well, yeah, The. The part about the syphilis.

[36:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: The syphilis? Yeah. That somebody who was. So Robert Block, the author of Psycho, was a protege of Lovecraft's and. Right. Was a protege of Robert Blocks. And she. She says, as. As other people have suggested, that Lovecraft was born with syphilis.

[36:27] BRYANT O'HARA: Right.

[36:28] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Explains a lot about his oeuvre. So. Which is. I. I find That. A really interesting notion. You know, the family curse, people who turn into people who look like frogs. You know, the. The I core, the aversion to sex and genitalia, on and on and on. Right. You can. You can kind of diagnose the man through his fiction.

[36:52] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[36:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And I have a poem about it myself that I will not utter here.

[37:03] BRYANT O'HARA: But the thing is. Yeah, my. And I think that's kind of where I kind of chose to kind of take a different path from his, because I do. I look at it, the universe, in its vastness, in its. In its vast indifference. Not so much as this thing that should be feared, but kind of enjoyed. To look at it as not a place of, you know, descending into madness, but of being in awe, you know, and being okay with the idea of transforming into whatever it is that you can transform into.

[37:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, that is an interesting statement. You know, from the. Before our first StoryCorps talk, literally the first thing I wrote after I put your name down in my notes was you treat the idea of recombination as an aesthetic.

[38:14] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[38:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So talk about that for the few minutes we have left, would you?

[38:19] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, I think it's. It's something I Kind of. A little bit of it I kind of learned from. From having looked at William S. Burroughs work. The idea is that if you wind up cutting up things and then putting them into a different order, the idea is that there are connections that our brain makes that tried to parse meaning out of that because we are pattern seeking animals. And that's not a bug, you know, that's a. That's a feature of the species. And I choose to take that idea of when you recombine things, you get different patterns. And some of those patterns can be useful patterns. And so I take it as an exercise. It's something that, again, that's what the species kind of does. We take what looks like chaos and make sense of it, however well or badly we do it. But we do it.

[39:26] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, well. So, any last thoughts? I feel like we. I feel like we covered a lot of ground that had been. We'd stepped over previously, building a lot of.

[39:44] BRYANT O'HARA: A lot of.

[39:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Empty spaces right today.

[39:55] BRYANT O'HARA: But. Well, go ahead, I guess, for last thoughts. I think I'm not done having the conversations that I think I need to have. Again, there are a lot of. I think given the environment that we live in now with the. There still being these remnants of racial disparity and antagonism, I still feel like I have the opportunity to address some of those in a style that is my own. Like, I was talking about my next. My next project actually, is going to be pretty well based on something very personal. You know, when I found out recently that one of my ancestors was lynched in Atlanta. Yeah. His name was Thomas Finch.

[41:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Mm.

[41:12] BRYANT O'HARA: So he was like my great, great uncle, I think.

[41:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[41:17] BRYANT O'HARA: But, yeah, so I found that once I discovered that connection of me to the history of this place, I knew that I was gonna have to write something on it and try to speak to it in a way that was gonna make a point, you know, be unique about making that point. Sorry.

[41:42] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Sorry.

[41:43] BRYANT O'HARA: Light. So, yeah, I have a challenge ahead of me that the next set of poems I wind up doing are going to take on some subject matter much more directly, I think, than some of my other works have, so. Yeah, I look forward to that.

[42:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, me too. So. Well, Bryant I. I really want to thank you for. For being so willing to pour time into this time after time. And. Yeah, maybe at some point down the line we will get to talk again here.

[42:25] BRYANT O'HARA: I hope so. Maybe after the book comes out and then we'll a discussion about that.

[42:32] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Excellent. I look forward to that. Thank you again.

[42:36] BRYANT O'HARA: Thanks for having me.