And certainly I want to have meaning and evoke meaning. I love difficult poetry and I’d love to write difficult poetry, but it’s just not the way I sing. But if we are not confronted with something difficult, then there isn’t a place to grow.

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Among the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s assignments for her writing students was to begin a poem with the words “I could not say.” Acknowledging the taboo at the heart of a silence, can nudge expression free. Shaking desire free of taboos is revolutionary. The revolution is incomplete if it focuses on our autonomy only from the state. The state is not the only entity that exercises power over us, especially if we do not identify as cisgender men.

The story tellers are, in my view, thinking. And thinking is what we need to do, not the discipline of philosophy or political economy or biology or literature or or or. The disciplines will take care of themselves. […] Thinking is what we are about and thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers. And some of the best thinking is done as story telling.

writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression