In his new memoir, Dear Father, J. Ivy describes the pain of being abandoned by his father. But the book is not just about that relationship and what might have been. It’s a retracing of a unique career, and what it took for Ivy to get to the place he is today. A Grammy Award-winning poet and spoken-word artist, Ivy is also the author of the book HERE I AM: Then & Now and has collaborated with Kanye West and Jay-Z.
He tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that his path to becoming a writer was a long one….
One of the chapters [in his new memoir] is actually titled … “Forgiveness is Remembering to Forgive Again.” And I learned that because there would be so many moments, you know so many life moments that would happen and … I wish my father was there for me to pick up the phone and talk to him. A year and a half after that moment, after us reconnecting, he passed away. … There was a lot of regret, which would lead back to those moments of anger. And there was guilt and there was sadness. And, you know, there were just these things that would reconjure in my mind. And it wasn’t until I wrote this poem that I was able to exercise that forgiveness on a regular basis.