The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson - The Rumpus

Maybe this is all taking me back to Annie Dillard, my first writing teacher, whose influence on me abides, and who famously and reassuringly once wrote, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.” In other words, the empty-handedness is import... See more

I prefer old school Audre Lorde’s version of risk:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to sta

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