Against a Singular Story: A Conversation with Jane Wong
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...more. . . intellectual rigor or artistic integrity don’t have to come at the expense of legibility . . .
...moreI don’t think there are easy answers. Should we make judgments about rudeness when we talk about artistic freedom?
...moreOlivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel Glassworks (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2023) follows one family through four generations. The story begins in 1910 with the wealthy young philanthropist Agnes Carter, and then follows her descendants, both in blood and in spirit, up until the present time. Each person’s story builds on those that came before it, creating a […]
...moreI’m working on a piece right now for the New York Times where I knew the last sentence before I knew the argument I was making.
...moreGoing around the world because you can’t go through it
...moreI approach research dutifully and compulsively.
...moreSome books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from any genre. Is it memoir or environmental literature?The book covers so much terrain: Black history, gardening in the West, motherhood, and the care and cultivation […]
...morepart of my fixation with textured and torqued language . . . stems from growing up in the South, where figurative language isn’t limited to formal literary spaces.
...moreDon’t we often write about what we struggle to understand?
...moreIt’s my year of Banana.
...moreAbove everything else, people come first.
...moreI’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I’m in control.
...more. . . fall in love with honey bees, or fall in love with the forest . . .
...moreThinking in terms of the poetry of your life is about noticing that you are one of the sentient beings in a universe with billions of galaxies, and your experience is the universe knowing itself and it is weird and messy and painful but it matters.
...more“The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?”
...moreHorses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I am knocked about.
...moreI did some research on how the vertical slash was used in different contexts, and fell in love with the Sheffer stroke.
...moreWe must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language
...moreThe Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.
...moreMaybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby
...moreEvery day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
...moreOur lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
...more“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
...moreI suppose I’m obsessed with how we buffer uncertainty.
...moreI think, as writers, we only have so much choice. Obsessions emerge from our lived experience.
...moreI like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.
...moreI want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
...moreI’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
...moreI wanted to be able to frame the story within this understanding that these are powerful forces and that these are stories we’ve heard a lot before, and that these stories get in the way of, or make it hard to understand or even listen to, a more authentic or more real story about who people are or can be.
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