We've all heard the term "Living the American Dream." For me, this dream of a possible future beyond the poverty embedded inside my Black inner-city youth, was all I had as a child and teenager. But as I've grown older, I've come to realize that dreams have power and manifest in strange ways throughout our daily decisions to either fulfill our dream-self or not. But what happens when you learn that what you thought was your dream was really only social conditioning? In this conversation with author, scholar, and performance maker Season Butler, we discuss her debut novel "Cygnet" and the cruel optimistic circumstances that inspired the story and frames the psychic state of its protagonist.

*Cruel Optimism is a term coined by American theorist Lauren Berlant and refers to the way the modern human clings to such fantasies of the "good life" even when the conditions for surviving the modern world have become increasingly more compromised due to climate change, economic failure, social injustice, political unrest, and more. Learn more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppdd2R46Eh4