Digging the Dead: Interview with Jesse Hathaway Diaz
INTERVIEW THE SECOND
Jesse Hathaway Diaz
In Which the Good Doctor interviews Three Goats in a Trenchcoat…
Turnabout being fair play, Al takes up the shovel and starts digging into Jesse. We begin with a simple enough proposition: the dead are relationships before they are technologies. Death does not flatten difference. The dead remain somebody’s dead—the dead of families and places, professions and catastrophes, lineages and communities—and knowing how to call a ghost is rather different from knowing what to do once one arrives.
From there, folklore becomes folkcraft: not merely asking what people have believed about ghosts, but what they actually did when confronted by them. We follow that thread through archives and their biases, ancestors and the politics of ancestry, and the tricky business of resurrecting broken traditions without mistaking our lovingly reconstructed substitutes for whatever was lost. Sometimes recovering an inheritance is rather less important than learning how to inherit well.
We wander onward into performance, possession, and embodied knowledge: bodies as archives; reading as a necromantic act; ritual knowledge carried through gesture, rhythm, repetition, breath, exhaustion, and attention. Tradition, meanwhile, becomes less a specimen preserved in amber than a container—something capable of holding experience, testing it, transmitting it, and giving us enough fluency to improvise without pretending we invented the language.
This brings us eventually to Folk Necromancy as a lens rather than a strictly defined field: a means of finding useful resonances without melting distinct spirits, communities, histories, and traditions into the great soup of Universal Spirit Work. And inevitably, we arrive at accountability: who gets access to knowledge, what relationship demands of us, how practice is tested by community, and whether any of this actually helps us acually live differently.
Perhaps, then, the question is not simply what we can get to rise from the grave, but—as Al puts it near the end—what we can nourish with the risen thing?
We hope you enjoy our second bit of digging. There are more guests to bother, more questions to ask, and considerably more dirt yet to get under our nails.
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