Delightful Observation

While walking along a path in Italy that brought him joy, Ross Gay suddenly thought that it would be a fun intellectual experiment to write a short essay about a pleasant experience every day for one year, beginning with his birthday. By the time he had turned a year older, Gay wrote essays about receiving high fives from strangers, ambiguous signage, flowers in the hands of statues, nicknames and more.

These essays became The Book of Delights (February 2019, Algonquin Books), the follow-up to his poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gay sat down with WD while promoting to talk about what inspired his book, following the movement of thought in drafts and writing