FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY |
TRANSLATION
SUBMIT STORE DONATE OPPORTUNITIES INTERVIEWS WRITERS WE PUBLISH
“I write poems, and mostly my work doesn’t weave itself whole. There are no rhymes; no child would ever demand to hear it during snack. If I have anything resembling a signature move, it is to write something and then write an additional part—sometimes this becomes the introduction, sometimes the conclusion—that explains why the other sections don’t hold together.”
As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator. Does it help, knowing that everything you do is fodder for future stories? Are new experiences better for providing you with new material, or scarier for removing your history and the foundation of your stories thus far?
I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap write about in the introduction to The Racial Imaginary anthology, about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.
What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.
The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart. Initially, this also appears true of Mill “Town, a recent hybrid memoir by Kerri Arsenault. In a beautifully touching moment near the end of her father’s prolonged fight against lung cancer, her mother guides him to the kitchen, her arms around his waist. He’s weak, on oxygen, and having trouble sleeping. His appetite has withered to almost nothing, and he’s suffering the indignity of a catheter. As they slowly make their way down the hallway, he turns to his wife. “Ain’t much of a life,” he says.”
Le Carré situates spying within the wider, mundane world. This, I believe, is why so many insist that he is a genre outlier, rather than an example of what can be accomplished within “genre writing” when the material is honored.
“I came to the Beastie Boys because I had heard my peers talking about them, and I believed talked-about things were things worth knowing. My personal mission was to learn a little bit about everything I heard referenced, and to have at the ready my own opinion on each topic.”
