Navigating the Messy, the Scary, and the Beautiful: A conversation with Marisa Crane
I think humor is so important to who we are as people, how we deal with pain, how we connect with one another. It’s essential to my being and my writing.
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Join NOW!I think humor is so important to who we are as people, how we deal with pain, how we connect with one another. It’s essential to my being and my writing.
...moreTwo huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
...moreI have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
...moreI think that it’s helpful to imagine your own people as your primary audience even when you are also writing for an audience that doesn’t necessarily belong to this community.
...moreI imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
...moreOnly after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.
...moreLove is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.
...moreI was looking for people who had something to say beyond This is the dumbest movie of all time.
...moreI developed two books. One I called “The Gay Book,” and one I called “The North Dakota Book.” Well, those are the same book, as you can imagine.
...moreThere is a hyper self-awareness in all my work that acknowledges—teases itself, maybe—what it is addressing and from what entry point. I once modeled in a campaign for socks I designed for a skate label and on the box there was a small excerpt from one of my books.
...moreFor me, it is actually harder to write a book that is grounded in realism, as that is not how I see the world or how my family sees the world.
...moreThe Rumpus Book Club chats with C. Russell Price about his poetry collection Oh You Thought This Was a Date?! (Triquarterly Books, June 2022), playlists, and the ongoing end- of-the-world.
...moreWhat’s the difference between sports bras and regular bras?—
What’s the difference between Jesus and God?
Family relies on the antics of nationalism: who belongs, who doesn’t, to whom are we loyal, to whom are we not . . . I suppose “family” is another F-word that can be something that brings pleasure, or that might be deployed as a weapon if in the mouth of the wrong person.
...moreIt is okay to feel more than one thing.
...moreTransient feelings about feelings of deliverance from (I’d say, national) anxiety. People are micro-dosing on sentimental poetry.
...moreAs I say to myself, living under the reality of this new, second cancer, I am rich in minutes. Maybe not in years, or, who knows, even months. But minutes, yes. So, I try not to squander them.
...moreSo many of the metaphors we use that come from the body and bodily experience are ableist and predicated upon a notion of “normal.” In educational systems, that idea of “normal” has led to serious accessibility issues, to separate and unequal classrooms.
...moreThe way we arrange the conditions of our togetherness can allow all the writing to happen that beckons to happen.
...moreThe reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
...moreWriting is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it’s not someone else making the terrible things happen.
...more. . . it was clear in my head that the dog in the book would not die, that he would bring people together, and also function as a kind of barometer for good and evil because, in my experience, that is how dogs are.
...moreBut food is not just a tool for memory, but also important in terms of social justice issues which Indian Americans don’t talk about because we are the model minority. We don’t want to get in trouble.
...moreI personally find this myth of authenticity extremely insidious and damaging, because it often leads to purity tests and the constant need to prove one’s cred . . . rather than leading to constructive thought and action—
...moreWhat’s funnier than somebody having a mental breakdown? We all experienced it, so why can’t we laugh at that?
...moreIs it ridiculous to say don’t give up? Because I mean it.
...moreA conversation with Michael Chang, “the bad boy of poetry.”
...moreAllyson McCabe talks with Brendan Toller about his love of vinyl records, buying music in local stores, and his latest documentary film Danny Says, an examination of publicist and manager Danny Fields.
...moreAlejandro Zambra discusses his latest book, Multiple Choice, inspired by the Chilean exam administered to students seeking college admission
...moreStuart Dybek discusses the forthcoming The Best Small Fictions 2016, the invisibility of anecdote, and why the art of transition is the art of the short story.
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