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While I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce and agree upon as identity.
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As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.
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On Direct Sunlight, the alchemy of titles and first lines, teaching, kangaroo humans, The National, and more.
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In many ways, community is that which allows the heart to heal, and to heal that heart together.
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. . . intellectual rigor or artistic integrity don’t have to come at the expense of legibility . . .
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Olivia 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 […]
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I’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.
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Going around the world because you can’t go through it
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Don’t we often write about what we struggle to understand?
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It’s my year of Banana.
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“The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?”
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Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
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I don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter, which sounds more like an invitation.
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Our 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.
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“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
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I suppose I’m obsessed with how we buffer uncertainty.
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I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
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I think we are all shaped by history, whether we accept this or not.
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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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Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
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I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
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I 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.
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I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
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Only 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.
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Love is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.
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I was looking for people who had something to say beyond This is the dumbest movie of all time.
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I 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.
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There 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.
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For 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.
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The 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.
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