Posts Tagged: The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson’s Natural

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Reading Maggie Nelson can be like banging your head against the wall of categories—or being miraculously freed from them. At Fiction Advocate, Colter Ruland elicits an explanation of hybridity from Nelson:

I just do what’s natural, I’m not thinking, “this is high,” “this is low,” “let’s combine them.” Often I don’t know that something wasn’t “supposed” to be in conversation with something else until someone else reads it that way and tells me so; to me it’s just one flow.

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The Self as a Cultural Artifact

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[Memoir] comes alive at the fissures of its coherency: when a narrator is struggling to hold the self together in a text—for the reader’s sake if not also her own.

Scott F. Parker met up with Maggie Nelson at AWP to talk about her writing, her sudden popularity, memoir (or life writing), autotheory, and Buddhism for The Believer’s interview series, Stories of Self—complete with illustrations by Nelson’s partner, Harry Dodge.

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Ablaze with Care

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As we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck.

Maggie Nelson, interviewed by Paul Laity for the Guardian, talks about her life before and during her deservedly acclaimed autobiotheoreticalnovel The Argonauts, from following Eileen Myles to New York after graduate school to the investigation of her aunt’s brutal murder, and the love she’s found and made continually new.

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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Tina Horn

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I would go so far as to say that the entire reason I write is to detect all the irony that language allows and twist it around the truth like razor wire and ivy. That’s how I like my truth: twisted. ...more

Perfunctory Rebellion

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Over at BOMB, A.L. Stein sits down with Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, to chat about metaphysics, attachments, and her relationship with the normative:

“The normative/transgressive dichotomy is so deep. I remember a student I had a while ago, a trans person deeply invested in anti-assimilation, who was saying to me quite plaintively one day, “I just don’t see how to keep resisting the normative!” So I asked him, “Can you name what it is, exactly, that you feel like you have to resist?” And he said, “Well, I don’t want to get married or have a baby.” After he left my office I just kept thinking, Well, that’s weird, ‘cuz I’m married, and I have a baby.”

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The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson

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Author Maggie Nelson talks about matrophobia, “sodomitical maternity,” breaking down categories between genres of writing, and her new book, The Argonauts. ...more

Growing Up: The Rumpus Interview with Michelle Tea

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Michelle Tea discusses life in recovery, the meaning of family, motherhood, and her new memoir How to Grow Up. ...more

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