274: Danielle Chapman: How Do You Inherit a Legacy You Can't Defend?

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There is a fear that keeps most of us from looking too hard at where we come from: that we will turn over the wrong rock and find something we cannot carry. In the South, a holler is the tangled place on the riverbank you are told not to go. It is also a primal yell, and, as it happens, the sound Marines make. Danielle Chapman is a poet, a lecturer at Yale, and the author of the memoir ⁠Holler: A Poet Among Patriots⁠. She was raised largely by her grandfather, a four-star general and former Commandant of the Marine Corps, after her father drowned off the coast of Okinawa when she was three. She spent twelve years turning what began as a political critique of her past into something…