What does it mean to learn from failure? Eve L. Ewing has an idea.

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, professor, researcher, and Chicago native. But even that list of titles doesn’t feel adequate to describe the breadth of her creative output and the depth of her intellectual and academic work. She writes fiction for young people and adults, poetry, serious academic books about education policy, and seriously mainstream comic books in the Black Panther/Wakanda series. She’s also a professor, a community organizer, head of the Beyond Schools research lab, and an artist.

In this month’s Highlight Podcast, Jonquilyn Hill and Eve talk about how she gets so much done, why she pushes herself to try new things, what she’s learned from a lifetime in education, and what, through her research lab, she still hopes to figure out.

What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full version here or in the player below:

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I’m not going to lie, it was kind of hard to pin down what exactly to talk about because you write so much. Is there a through line through all that work? How do you think of all of your work in conversation with one another?

I think that part of why it feels overwhelming or confusing to people is that I work across a lot of different genres. And I think that a lot of people define their work by the genre in which they write. And for me, I’m more interested in a connected set of questions.

Some of my work is about the world as it is and how it got to be this way. And some of it is about the world as it could be and how we speculate to create something different.

I’m a scholar of education, specifically race and inequality in education. And so a lot of my work in that arena is thinking about the histories of racial inequality in the US, and how schools are a reflection of a broader, unequal society. But also how schools play a role in perpetuating and normalizing that inequality.

In the speculative world and thinking about how the world could be otherwise, I spend a lot of time writing poetry and comics and thinking about Afrofuturism and other ways of doing imaginative work.

But the real thing is that I just like telling stories. And as I think about the kind of work that I want to do, I’m really just setting about to tell the best stories that I can in the ways that they want to be told.

And I am too foolish, too silly to be bound by the idea that, “Well, I’ve never written this type of thing in this way before.’ So usually if it occurs to me, I’m just willing to give it a shot.

In preparation for this conversation, I watched a conversation between you and the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib. And you had this really funny story about your redemption arc as a spades player.

So two summers ago, I co-founded and co-taught a two-week writing workshop with a group of Howard students, and I found none of them could play spades. So I taught them how to play spades and now there are some Bison out there that can count me as their spades grandma.

You said you were able to look at spades in a new way through that teaching. What does teaching teach you?

So I think that part of my commitment to spades is that in my little literary circle, I am known as a wild spades player in the sense of being sometimes unreliable. Like I have done my partners dirty.

Have you reneged?

I’m gonna take the fifth on that. The point is, I’ve gotten so much better over time because I’m willing to take feedback and I’m willing to fail in public.

I think that it’s really hard to be effective as an artist if you’re not comfortable with failure. It’s really, really hard to be effective at creating anything if you’re not comfortable with the idea that you have to work through your own sometimes poor showing. Because it’s only when you get comfortable with that that you can ever get better, right? And I feel like writers and artists across all disciplines say this, but it’s really hard to actually do.

I try to maintain in my life a practice of always being willing to try some things that I’m not great at and muddle through them. Part of why that’s my practice is that it helps me maintain discipline as a writer.

I do things that I’m mediocre at because it gives me the fortitude to show up and grind through a really bad first draft and come back to it.

Whereas people that maybe are more talented but less tenacious than me would just quit. And again, this is not a unique insight. Baldwin said this, Alexander Chee says this, lots of writers will say it’s not really about talent. It’s about a willingness to finish, to complete things. And that requires being bad.

How did you get comfortable with failure?

Yeah, it’s scary right? Part of your question about teaching is that: how can I be in a position as an educator where I’m asking people to be vulnerable, be not great at things, try new things, do things that are maybe new to them, receive feedback, receive advice, revise. How can I ask that of anybody else if I’m not willing to do that of myself?

I’m half joking about the spades thing, but Im also quite serious. There’s a lot of people in my life that are really amazing at spades, and then there’s a lot of people that never learned how to play. And I’m like, if this is an art that’s important to us, specifically as Black people, if we’re saying this is part of our culture, then we have to be willing to put ourselves out there. Or else it dies, you know?

I think that’s interesting, especially when you talk about your relationship with your students, with young people, because I read in an interview from a few years ago that you think one of the most impactful things you’ve written is Maya and the Robot.

Maya and the Robot is a novel I wrote for young readers. And it’s about a girl whose best friend is a robot. And it’s about a lot of other things too. I knew that people who were familiar with [my nonfiction] work were not necessarily going to go out and pick up this work of children’s fiction. And I feel like, obviously that’s everybody’s prerogative.

But I feel like people, outside of folks who write for kids and educators, often don’t take children’s literature seriously. And I think that whether or not you choose to make reading literature for young people part of your everyday practice, the fact of the matter is that for most people in our culture, their most vibrant reading life happens before they turn 18, happens in school.

And so given that, many people, if you ask them, what’s your favorite book or what’s your best memory as a reader? They’re going to tell you about something that they read when they were children, right?

When I approached writing that book, I did so with that sense of responsibility that if you’re going to write for young people, you are playing a really serious role in shaping how people think about literature in our culture for the rest of their lives.

So we’ve been talking about your writing a lot, but I also want to ask you about your research, particularly the Beyond Schools Lab. Tell us what it is you research there.

So I have a small research group, at the University of Chicago that I call the Beyond Schools Lab. Basically it’s just giving a name to me and the graduate students, undergraduate students, and colleagues that I am lucky enough to collaborate with.

The idea that undergirds all of that research and the reason why I use that term beyond schools is that I think within education, we have a way of assigning all of the culpability and responsibility, for transforming schools to people in those schools.

And what we often don’t do is think about the ways that schools themselves are a reflection of the broader social structure in which they are enacted.

Part of what I mean when I say beyond schools is how do we think about what happens in education space as being a collective responsibility that transcends what we traditionally call education?

And how do we push people in power, but also from the grassroots level? How do we think about not just test scores and grades and graduation rates and things like that, but how we create opportunities for all young people to have the lives that they want to have and the lives that they deserve, in ways that reflect a sense of collective responsibility?

I don’t necessarily identify as a Christian, but there’s a lot of stuff in Christianity, in the Bible that appeals to me or that I call upon a lot. And one of them is the idea of the least of these, where Jesus says “that what you do to the least of these, you do unto me.”

I think about children as being people who are in many ways made the most vulnerable to the shifting social currents of our world and who also are systematically denied political and civic power to change and affect those currents. If we have people that are unhoused, if we have people that don’t have good jobs, if we have air that is not clean, young people bear the brunt of that from the time they are born and often don’t have a lot of control in being asked to contribute to shaping responses to those issues. How do we all show up and take on collective responsibility, to change those circumstances?