Lauren Crichton

Rereading is training, practice for remaking and unmaking—and, yes, razing—the world. Rereading draws your best thoughts close, keeps them at the ready, prepares you to think thoughts with them, prepares you to act with them at hand. Your favorite reads are your armor and your weapons and your shelter all in one. What have you gathered about you? W... See more

The British sociologist Marilyn Strathern ... taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).” ... It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots; what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions,

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Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which yo... See more

I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck.

I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t recall spending a lot of time thinking about that decision or contemplating the consequences of it. It seemed right and so I ran with it. But it has since given rise to a kind of scholarship and writing that I’m not sure I would have l... See more

What do they do,

the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?

They go there with empty hands,

into the gap between.

They come back with things in their hands.