Welcome in. It is so great to have you here with
us today for a brand new deep dive. Yeah, really
glad you could join us. We have a... truly remarkable
set of sources lined up for you we're primarily
looking at a comprehensive wikipedia article
detailing the life the career and just the the
profound creative evolution of rachel eliza griffiths
right and it's a fascinating evolution to look
at it really is and we are bringing you this
deep dive with a very specific mission in mind
today we want to explore how a truly adaptable
mind translates the human experience across entirely
different mediums and you know more importantly
what you can learn from her approach when it
comes to processing life's absolute biggest,
most overwhelming moments. Because to call Griffith
just a writer would be, well, it'd be a massive
understatement. Oh, absolutely. She is this true
creative force, a poet, a novelist, a photographer,
a visual artist, and a memoirist. That versatility
is really the core of what we are looking at
today. We aren't just tracing a bibliography
or a timeline of publications. Right. It's bigger
than that. Exactly. This deep dive is fundamentally
about the intersection of art, resilience, and
the sheer power of changing your lens, sometimes
literally changing your lens when looking at
the world. Yeah. When you examine her life, you
see someone who absolutely refuses to be confined
by a single mode of expression. If a feeling
or a trauma or a memory is just too big for a
poem, she picks up a camera. If it's too expansive
for a photograph, she writes a novel. Okay, let's
unpack this by going right back to the beginning
to see where that kind of adaptable foundation
actually comes from. So Rachel Eliza Griffiths
was born in Washington, D .C. in December of
1978. She's the eldest of four children, and
the details of her parents' professions provide
this really fascinating contrast that seems to
inform, well, so much of what she does later
on. It really does. Her mother, Michelle, was
a community organizer and a former police officer,
and her father, Norman, was an environmental
lawyer. What's fascinating here is how that specific
parental dynamic shapes an artist's worldview
from day one. I mean, think about what those
two distinct worlds represent. On one side, you
have an environmental lawyer. That is a career
built entirely on navigating complex legal structures,
statutes, and systemic rules just to protect
the physical world. It requires this highly analytical,
rigid adherence to codes. Very structured. Exactly.
Very structured. On the other side, you have
a mother who spent her time as a police officer
and a community organizer. That represents a
deep, messy engagement with civic duty, grassroots
human connection. Yeah, the on -the -ground stuff.
The immediate, uncodified realities of a neighborhood's
daily life. The dichotomy there is just striking.
You have the rigid rules of law from her father
and then the fluid human -centric realities of
community organizing from her mother. Growing
up in a household so deeply focused on societal
structures and civic responsibility, it really
seems to have given her this intimate understanding
of how boundaries work. She learned the rules
so well that she eventually figured out how to
break almost every structural boundary in her
own work. Yeah, she essentially takes... the
idea of structure and completely bends it to
her will. But the thing is, she didn't just start
breaking rules immediately. No, not at all. She
spent a long time mastering them first. Yeah,
her educational background really reflects that
deep commitment to mastering traditional structures.
She graduated from St. Mark's High School, then
went to the University of Delaware, where she
earned both her undergraduate degree and her
first master's degree. Then she pursued an MFA
in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College,
which is... I mean, it's highly regarded in the
literary world. And the source material highlights
that she was awarded just a massive array of
fellowships along the way. A really impressive
list. We are talking about the Cave Canem Foundation,
Kimbilio, the Millet Colony, the Vermont Studio
Center, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center,
the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo.
And when you hear names like Yaddo or the Cage
Canem Foundation, it is so important to understand
what those spaces actually represent. They aren't
just lines on a resume. No, not at all. These
are the most prestigious, rigorous incubators
for generational talent in the country. Cave
Canem, for instance, is absolutely foundational
for nurturing African -American poetic voices.
While places like Yaddo have hosted some of the
most consequential writers of the last century.
Yeah. By being invited into these spaces, she
was thoroughly establishing herself within the
highest echelons of the literary establishment.
Her work was appearing in The New Yorker, The
Paris Review, The New York Times, Guernica. She
built this formidable academic and institutional
foundation. But rather than getting comfortable
inside that very prestigious, very traditional
literary bubble, she used it as a launch pad
for something much more expansive. And that actually
brings us to a core quote from Griffiths from
an interview back in 2015. This quote really
serves as the thesis for her entire career. She
said, I like the fluidity each genre offers me
spatially, emotionally, and creatively. I can
take an idea, word fragment, or image and open
it up across forms. The inclusion of the word
spatially in that quote is so striking to me.
Yeah, it really is. We usually think of writing
as happening flatly on a page. You read left
to right, top to bottom. But she sees a piece
of art as a three -dimensional space. She looks
at a fragment of a thought and asks a structural
question. Does this belong in the tight, rhythmic
stanza of a poem? Or does this belong physically
inside the frame of a camera lens? It almost
reminds me of someone who speaks multiple languages
fluently. Like if you only speak English, there
are certain concepts or jokes or emotions in
other cultures that simply do not have a direct
translation. Right. You just can't express them
fully with the vocabulary you have. Griffiths
realized early on that the human experience is
way too complex for just one language. So she
built a toolkit of different mediums, like a
mechanic. If you only have a wrench, you can
only fix certain problems. But she learned the
language of poetry. She learned the language
of photography. She even created a video interview
series called Poets on Poetry. By building this
massive multidisciplinary vocabulary, she ensured
that she could articulate absolutely any emotional
reality she encountered. It makes you wonder
how often we get stuck in our own lives, simply
because we are using the wrong medium to process
a problem. I want you to think about this. When
you face a complex problem or emotion at work
or in life, Do you try to force it into your
default way of thinking? Yeah, people do that
all the time. People often try to talk their
way out of a conflict. Well, maybe they need
to write it down to see the pattern. Or we stare
at a spreadsheet trying to find a creative solution
when we should be drawing a map of the process.
Griffith's approach shows us that sometimes the
barrier to understanding isn't the problem itself.
It is the medium we are defaulting to. Wow. Yeah.
Her career provides the ultimate proof of why
having those multiple mediums is so necessary.
For a long time, she was primarily known for
her incredible success in poetry. By 2011, she
was featured in the first poetry issue of Oprah
Winfrey's O Magazine. Huge deal. Massive. early
collections like Miracle Arrhythmia and They're
Quite a Distance were making serious waves. And
her 2011 collection, Mule and Pear, won the inaugural
Poetry Award from the Black Caucus of the American
Library Association in 2012. That is a major
recognition from a foundational institution.
By the time her 2015 collection, Lighting the
Shadow, became a finalist for multiple prizes,
she had essentially conquered the poetry world.
Here's where it gets really interesting. The
pivot. Yes, the pivot. In 2020, she published
a project called Seeing the Body. This was a
profound departure from her previous work, and
it emerged from a place of unimaginable, life
-altering grief. In 2014, Griffiths lost her
mother, the community organizer and former police
officer we discussed earlier. Losing her mother
fundamentally shifted Griffiths' creative output.
She didn't just write a book of poems to process
the loss. She paired her poetry with her own
original photography. And the choice to bring
in photography for that specific project carries
immense thematic weight. The source notes that
seeing the body explores memory, Black womanhood,
the American landscape, and rebirth. But the
deeper question is why blending visual and textual
art is so uniquely effective for processing grief.
Grief is an emotion that notoriously defies language.
Words often feel incredibly hollow or insufficient
when you are facing the absolute finality of
losing a parent. They really do. By pairing poetry
with photography, she anchors the abstract floating
pain of loss into physical reality. A photograph
captures a frozen moment in time. It is quite
literally the ghost of a second that has passed.
That perfectly mirrors what grief feels like.
You are constantly looking at the ghosts of the
past. A review in Guernica magazine captured
the effect of that combination perfectly. They
stated that the collection brings together poetry
and photography to powerful effect, providing
the reader with an experience that's both visually
and emotionally arresting. Visually and emotionally
arresting. Exactly. When a book arrests you,
it stops you in your tracks. You turn the page
and you aren't just reading about her loss, you
are visually confronting it. The world recognized
the sheer power of that hybrid approach immediately.
The way she allowed her grief to dictate the
medium rather than forcing her grief into the
familiar box of standard poetry resonated on
a massive scale. The accolades for seeing the
body were staggering. It was selected as one
of NPR's best books of 2020. It won the 2021
Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the
2021 Patterson Poetry Prize. Just incredible.
It was even nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image
Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.
A reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books
called it a radiant and soulful collection. She
managed to take the most devastating, disorienting
moment of her life and translate it into a masterpiece
just by expanding her artistic vocabulary. But
as we see, where the mind is adaptable, and restless
as hers. The boundaries of her canvas just keep
expanding. When she realizes she can move between
forms, she doesn't stop. No, she takes an entirely
new leap in 2023. After establishing herself
as a highly decorated poet, a visual artist,
and a photographer, she steps into the world
of fiction. A huge jump. She released her debut
novel, Promise, which was published by Random
House in the U .S. and John Murray in the U .K.
We are talking about someone who had already
achieved the highest possible honors in poetry,
deciding to be a debut artist all over again
with global publishing houses behind her. And
the critical reception proved that her mastery
translated to fiction just as well. Kirkus Reviews
called it a stunning and evocative portrait of
love, pride and survival. And the reviewer at
The Times gave this incredibly visceral assessment,
saying the novel is by turns enchanting and enraging.
And it left me emotionally shattered. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, we have to talk about
the sheer creative stamina required for a shift
of this magnitude. Moving from poetry to a novel
isn't just a matter of typing more words on a
page. It requires entirely different creative
muscles. Right. It's a completely different discipline.
Exactly. Poetry is the art of condensation. It
is about distilling a massive emotion or complex
image down to its absolute most potent essence.
A brilliant poem can capture the feeling of a
single sharp intake of breath. A novel, however,
is the art of expansion. It requires vast world
-building, intricate narrative pacing, complex
character arcs, and an endurance that can sustain
an emotional throughline over hundreds of pages.
The fact that she could pivot from the condensed,
highly visual world of poetry into the sprawling
narrative endurance test of a novel and still
leave critics emotionally shattered shows an
unparalleled command of the human emotional engine.
That toolkit just continues to grow. And all
of those skills, the poetic condensation, the
visual framing, the narrative expansion set the
stage for what might be her most significant
convergence of life, identity and art. We need
to look at her personal identity and the major
life changes that directly inform her latest
work. Griffiths identifies as a queer black woman.
And in 2021, she married the Indian born British
American novelist Salman Rushdie. Right. They
reside together in New York City. And in January
of 2026, she published her memoir titled. the
flower bearers. The shift to memoir is arguably
the most vulnerable choice a writer can make.
In poetry, you can always hide behind the veil
of a metaphor. In fiction, you can distribute
your own pain or joy among invented characters.
But a memoir strips all of that protective distance
away. Exactly. You're presenting your lived reality
directly to the reader. And the lived reality
explored in this memoir is incredibly heavy.
The Guardian described the book in a way that
highlights its vast emotional range. They called
it simultaneously a love story. a portrait of
sisterhood, and a visceral depiction of violence,
loss, and emotional devastation. The context
for that violence and devastation is highly specific
and globally known. As noted by the iPaper, the
memoir offers a painful insight into the stabbing
of her husband, Salman Rushdie, told entirely
from her perspective. We are talking about an
intensely public, shocking, and violent trauma,
an event that generated endless global headlines,
think pieces, and political commentary. But for
Griffiths, this wasn't a news story. She experienced
it intimately as a wife watching her family endure
the unthinkable. This raises an important question,
and we want to look at it strictly through the
lens of art and emotional processing here. Absolutely.
How does an artist survive and process an intensely
public trauma? When the entire world is projecting
their own social, political, or cultural narratives
onto a violent event that happened to your own
family, how do you keep from being swallowed
by the noise? Yeah, how do you navigate that?
For Griffiths, the answer is to return to the
page. By writing a memoir, she actively reclaims
her own narrative. She refuses to let the public
or the press or the attacker define her experience
or her husband's experience. She takes control
of the story, framing a horrific act of violence
within the context of her own profound truth.
And as the reviews point out, her truth is ultimately
a story of love and sisterhood. It is an act
of supreme emotional defiance to answer that
kind of visceral violence with a deliberate,
slow and vulnerable work of art. So what does
this all mean? When we zoom out and look at this
entire projectory, from a young girl in Washington,
D .C., absorbing the lessons of an environmental
lawyer and a community organizer, to a celebrated
poet mastering traditional forms. To a visual
artist capturing the unspeakable grief of losing
her mother. Right. to a debut novelist building
expansive new worlds and finally to a memoirist
processing unimaginably public trauma it means
that her career is a living testament to art
as the ultimate survival mechanism she didn't
just make art for the sake of winning awards
she made art to survive the crushing weight of
being alive when a feeling or a trauma was too
heavy to carry on her own she built a new creative
form to hold it for her that is the synthesis
of her entire journey Rachel Eliza Griffiths
demonstrates the profound power of never letting
your tools limit your expression. She never let
a specific genre dictate what she was allowed
to feel or how she was allowed to heal. If the
genre didn't work for the season of life she
was in, she found a new one. And that is a perspective
that translates far beyond the literary world.
Whether you are prepping for a meeting, trying
to communicate a difficult truth to a partner,
navigating a complex crisis at work, or just
trying to make sense of an increasingly chaotic
world, having multiple genres of thought is invaluable.
Do not let your default setting trap you into
thinking there is only one way to look at a problem.
We want to leave you with a final lingering thought
today. Something to mull over on your own after
this deep dive ends. Think about the most defining,
perhaps the most difficult moment of your life.
If you had to capture it, what medium would you
choose right now? If you usually rely on words
to explain yourself, what would that moment look
like if you could only express it as a single
photograph without a caption? Try translating
your own experience into an entirely new form
today and see what hidden truths you discover
about yourself. You might be surprised by the
clarity you find when you just change the lens.
Thank you so much for joining us and exploring
this incredible life with us today. It's been
a privilege to sift through these sources and
share this journey with you. Take care of yourself,
try exploring a new medium today, and we'll see
you next time.