I thank my mother, Terezinha, for the power of her transforming love.
I'm always writing a new book even when books are being shopped around, and none of my books has been published in the order that they have been written.
I can start with the idea of taking until you can take off, through the idea that all of my writing foregrounds the idea of how I'm taking from my own life. I'm stealing from my own life in a way, and from the people around me, but in service of getting somewhere else. I'm starting with an autobiographical impulse, to get a better vantage on the circumstances of the life that I happen to be in at the moment and how that life connects to others.
William Faulkner was the master of what one must do to be serious. But I don't understand why people haven't moved forward from that, why that's not where the line in the sand is that you would see from. When I think about the reception of my own writing and what seems "difficult," there is an actual precedent.
As a gay writer and someone who began by writing autobiographical fiction, it's hard to get away from chatter of "You're just a narcissist," "You're just a gay man," "You're just looking for yourself in somebody else," "Why does your boyfriend look like you," a kind of baggage that you already have to create in the face of.
If you're reading a book that I've written in the first person, without named characters, you will periodically perhaps as a reader remind yourself: Well, this is or isn't the author. This is a character. I think the second person turns that dynamic onto you, or situates it within you: This isn't really me, but what aspect of the character is really me? That creates a loop of seduction.
I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.
If you don't have a cause bigger than yourself, you won't get beyond yourself.
My aim is a very modern Dior, but at the end of the day, I also look back.
Confused, I asked, "The coven's what?" "Plumber," Ivy said, looking pale as she leaned on Glenn. "You know. Stops leaks?" Oh goodie. I'm a leak.
Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher. . . . As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more. . . . Why has religion become a force just when we'd have thought it would be losing ground to secularism?