Ariana Isabel Duckett
News Editor
On May 8, essayist, poet, and professor Ross Gay, author of his 2019 essay collection “The Book of Delights” and winner of UCSB Reads 2025, spoke at Campbell Hall.
The evening began with readings of several select chapters from “The Book of Delights” and other works.
“While I’m writing this, sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat, a young woman walked by wearing a winter cat hat with pointy ears, walking a mini Doberman pinscher wearing matching pink booties, skittering across the asphalt,” Gay read from Chapter 16, “Hummingbird.” The audience was very amused by the description. “I swear to you,” he emphasized.
Gay told the audience he chose to read from “Hummingbird” because “a student said she liked it.” Gay had attended the College of Creative Studies’ Walking Biology class earlier that day, in which students observe areas of ecological interest on- and off-campus. He was able to talk with students about his work as well as identify plants around campus.
Gay began writing an essay a day for “The Book of Delights.” Each essay is timestamped, and the first and final essays are from his birthday, Aug. 1. Gay admitted to skipping several days throughout the year.
Gay also read aloud Chapter 80, “Tomato On Board,” a humorous essay about his experience bringing a tomato plant onboard a plane and the reactions he received. “What you don’t know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you’re carrying a baby,” Gay writes. “When the security guy saw it was a tomato he smiled and said, ‘I don’t know how to check that. Have a good day.’”
Gay then announced an experiment: there were around 40 tomato plants in front of the Campbell Hall stage. He encouraged audience members to take a tomato plant, but only if they then brought the plant around with them for one day. The plants soon disappeared from the stage.
After several more chapter readings was a Q&A with Professor Waverly Duck of the sociology department. Questions for the Q&A were submitted before the event by students.
Duck admitted he had been recommended “The Book of Delights” on two separate occasions, once while he was grieving the loss of a family member, and wanted to know Gay’s thoughts on joy and time, themes Duck found present throughout the book.
Gay shared how he aspired to write one “book of delights” every five years. He mentioned the changes he noticed in what he wrote about in every book — aging, new “knee pains,” and losing people in his life. Ultimately, writing about delights was not intended to ignore or neglect the pains of life, but to reframe how one observes the world during those pains.
Duck also discussed education and potential alternate career paths Gay could have had. Gay is an English professor at Indiana University, and he thought there were no other careers for him. He joked that he has only been a gardener for 20 years, and that that is considered a brief amount of time in the gardening sphere.
He referenced the Walking Biology class once more and how a professor had told him why she enjoys teaching. He paraphrased from her, “I get to share what I love.”