 Mia documents and shares the work of political artists through her podcast, We Want the Airwaves, and her book of interviews, Queer and Trans, Artists of Color, Stories of Some of Our Lives. I'd like to invite up or introduce my co-editor, who edited the book with me, and her partner, Jessica. Sorry, this is Jessica, her partner is Tara. I'll let you introduce yourself. Sure. Just to recap that, I'm Jessica Glenanzukoff, co-editor of this book with Tara Michelson and Nia King. We're going to be reading a chapter in which Tara and I interviewed Nia. Sort of about the knowledge gained after interviewing the other 16 queer and trans artists of color in the book. So Nia, you've created an archive of advice from queer artists of color on making it as an artist. What advice gems stand out in your mind? One piece of advice that comes up a lot on the podcast is don't work for free. I think monetizing your work is one of the hardest things about being an artist, because everyone wants art, but nobody wants to pay for it. Folks feel like artists should be happy to work for exposure, but exposure is not going to pay your rent or put food in your fridge. It seems to me like it's not as hard to start getting more paid gigs and get paid at higher rates as it is to make that initial jump from unpaid artist to paid artist. This is fun because people in this room are in this book, and I'm going to talk about them. When Virgi Tovar first told me that she saw herself as part of a movement demanding payment for artists, I thought that was kind of extreme, or maybe unfair to artists who might really need the exposure. But now I realize how much creative labor, art making, is devalued in our society. Queer art activists of color are never going to be able to make a living doing our art if we don't demand payment for it. Art adds value to people's lives, and thus artists should be able to support themselves making it instead of having to sell their labor, body, or soul to others in order to keep creating. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of artist interview portions that are not strictly about identity, art, or politics, but rather about things like Rika Aoki's chemistry job? I like to try and ask questions that I think people haven't been asked before. Rika is known as a speaker and writer, but obviously her work has been influenced by more than just her current occupations or her identity. I found out that Rika was also a chemist and a martial arts master. Those are things that influence her work even if they don't always make it into her bio. I think it makes the artist feel respected when I ask non-obvious questions because they get to be seen as a whole multifaceted person rather than someone whose value is determined just based on the things they create. I'd also like to think that these kinds of questions make my interviews unique. One thing I hate that I feel like I see a lot on talk shows is when interviewers seem to really wanna focus on not only what makes the subject different, but also on what makes their life hard. Yossi Mareas and Fabian Nurmero both talk in their interviews about other people's perverse fascination with their hardships. There were times where guests open up about things that seemed like they would be really hard to talk about, like surviving homelessness, cancer, and rape. Instead of going deeper, I often backed away or made a conscious effort to bring the focus of the conversation back to the artist's work. I didn't wanna reopen wounds for folks and then just abandoned them with their pain when the interview was over. What do you like to be asked about? I like talking about the ethics of art activism because it's something I think about and struggle with a lot. It feels like a big responsibility to be the holder of people's stories and try and figure out what to do with them. I've had people come out to me as sex workers and survivors during interviews which I was not expecting. I've had people say things I thought were going to make them look bad or damage their reputation and then I had to ask myself, do I cut it, do I keep it? Is my obligation to protect the artists, potentially even from themselves, or to protect the community from them if they really do hold these oppressive beliefs they seem to be espousing? It's so easy for things to be taken out of context. Sometimes someone says something and I think that sounds really bad and I know you didn't mean it that way but I don't know if I can trust the audience to give them the benefit of the doubt. Those are the kinds of things I struggle with and that I try to talk about with other interviewers to figure out how they deal with these types of issues. I still feel really new at this. What has been the most surprising piece of feedback you've gotten about the podcast? After my first interview which was with Virjit Tovar who worked in radio for years, I asked if she had any interview tips for me. She said I should argue with the guests more. I was really surprised by it at the time. In my head I was like, but the guest is God. Who am I to argue with the guest? As I've gotten more comfortable interviewing, I've also gotten more comfortable challenging guests when they say something that comes across as problematic, as a problematic generalization or hyperbole. I don't try to attack my guests but I think sometimes being asked to defend your position forces you to clarify your thoughts and make sure that they actually make sense. And what's your philosophy for how much of yourself to put into interviews? In the beginning I was really shy and bad about speaking up. I got a lot of complaints actually that I was inaudible. I wanted so badly for it to be all about the guests that I didn't even mic myself. I still try not to make it too much about me but sometimes talking about myself first allows me to articulate a question that's not fully fleshed out yet. It also gives the guest something to relate to and work off of. You learned about anti-oppressive research methods as an undergraduate at Mills College, our alma mater, in the Ethnic Studies Department. Have the methodologies you learned at Mills or methodologies you studied on your own since graduating have the influence to how you conduct interviews? Definitely, it's so funny because this is just like a conversation between us but we're reading it out of a book. Here we are. I think the most important thing I've learned is that trust is the single most important thing in an interview. I also learned that the interviewer has a responsibility to take care of the interviewee emotionally not to just use them for information. That idea is really emphasized in the feminist and disability justice research methodologies I studied at Mills. I also learned the importance of not asking leading questions. If your questions are laden with value judgments, the interviewee will get defensive and closed off. I don't want guests to feel bullied into giving a certain answer. The interviews I feel least happy with are the ones where I feel like I came in with an agenda even when the agenda was fairly vague like I wanna talk about comedy with someone who's a comedian or someone's experience in the military or current events. That's a reference to Kiam Marcelo Junio who's a Chicago based artist, who's a veteran and also a yoga instructor and also a fashion designer. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about like being gay in the military and it turned out that it wasn't. But there's lots of other good stuff he said that is in the book. Letting the conversation go where it goes organically tends to yield much better, more interesting results. Do you feel like you've grown as an interviewer as the podcast has developed? I hope so. When I first did my interview with Virgy Tovar, I was really nervous and stuck strictly to the script. When I interviewed Courtney Ryan Ziegler, I overcompensated, got completely away from my prepared questions and the interview ended up being three hours long. This was like right after I interviewed Virgy and I was super nervous and stuck super closely to the script so I was like all right and went completely 100% the other direction. I figured out how to keep the interviews now to approximately one hour but also how to improvise. It can be challenging to think up questions while you're listening but I think which hopefully all of you are doing right now. But I think asking follow up questions based on what someone has just said makes them feel listened to and also allows a conversation to go organically to a more interesting place than it might have otherwise. Sonia, you're a writer, an instructor, a filmmaker, a cartoonist and a podcast host, not to mention a badass researcher. What approaches do you take to promoting yourself in your work? I promote my work and myself as much as I'm able and it's pretty exhausting. Building a website has probably been the most useful thing for my professional career. If you take one thing away from this, it should be that if you're an artist you need a website, period. When I cold call artists asking to interview them, they can look at my site and usually decide I seem pretty legit. I think that would be less true if the only places I could send them to learn more about me were Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. That said, I do use all three of these social media platforms a lot to promote my work, especially Twitter. And I know that you identify not so secretly as a home body and as an introvert. Do you feel like that affects your professional and your creative pursuits? I think more than being a home body and introvert where it hurts my professional and creative pursuits is struggling with depression. I think people who follow me on social media can tell that I work really hard and I'm constantly producing new stuff, but I feel like I could get a lot more done if I had more energy. Both my depression and my chronic pain make it so that I have to spend a lot of time recuperating from life when I could hypothetically be creating more work. I'm really trying to work through my internalized ableism and be proud of what I do get done instead of ashamed about how much I'd hoped to accomplish but didn't. What's your hope for this book? So I'm gonna use the acronym which is QDPOC which is short for Queer and Trans People of Color. I really want QDPOC art activism to become a flourishing field of research and study which I hope will create more institutional and economic support for marginalized artists to keep doing what they do. A lot of QDPOC cultural institutions are not documented. You only find out about them through word of mouth or by being at the right place at the right time. And they're often very short lived because people don't have the resources to sustain them. I wanted to create this book so that the work of these amazing artists who has influenced me will not seem like a flash in the pan if they eventually burn out or go broke or have to stop creating. I want there to be a record of their wisdom and their influence and their greatness that will inspire others to create as well. I really do believe that QDPOC art activism changes lives, saves lives, sorry. And this book is just one of my many efforts to show how and why. What advice would you personally give to other queer artists of color on making it as an artist? Firstly, don't compromise your vision to make your art more marketable to a community that's not your own. Secondly, find community with other artists who are like you and who get what you're trying to do. If you're trying to make work about race or gender or sexuality in a class with a bunch of straight white guys, there's a chance you might get good feedback. But a lot of times you're gonna encounter resistance and an inability to engage with whatever it is you're presenting. Then feedback you're getting there might not be as useful as feedback you might get from other people about personal experience with the issues you're trying to examine in your work. Lastly, don't be afraid of failure. At least, or at least don't let it hold you back. A part of why you're disadvantaged as a queer or trans person of color is that you're a queer or trans person of color. But another reason is that people who have privilege often don't let the fact that they don't know what they're talking about stop them from talking. Don't let the fact that they, oh, okay. This is very similar sentence, sorry, I got lost. I got excited. They don't let the fact that they don't know what they're doing stop them from doing stuff. But doing stuff is how you learn and how you get exposure. So overcoming fear of failure is really important if you wanna become successful as an artist. I think you have to operate with the faith that you will get a second chance if you mess up whether you really believe it or not. If you don't at least believe on some level that it's okay to make mistakes and that you will eventually be given another chance it's hard to get anywhere. And that's the end of this interview. Thank you.