Maggie Nelson Interviewed at The Cut

At New York Mag's style blog The Cut, Maggie Nelson talks with Maggie Lange about the "daring intimacy" of her work, its shareable qualities ("everyone always seems to be lending their copy [of The Argonauts] to someone else), and inclusivity in her writing. "At one point in our conversation," says Lange, "Nelson mentioned identifying with Foucault — who, when asked to describe his sexuality, said, 'I identify as a reader.' Perhaps that’s a helpful way to examine Nelson’s own work: absorbing can be intoxicating." An excerpt:

You’ve talked about your books as accidental. Do you see books you write as fated?

I guess I do, which is silly because they’re fairly volitional. But often as you’re finishing with one question you have usually produced another, just the way that you extrude clay through a hole. You got your piece but you left this big bunch of shit and then you want to make something, you go back to what you left behind. In that way to me, it feels like a fated flow, because I don’t often invent. I don’t clear out everything and go, Oh, what in the whole world, would I want to write about?

When people ask how long a book takes to write it’s always a hard question. The Argonauts is 20 years of reading feminist and queer theory. When did I start writing it? I don’t know! It couldn’t exist. And with the color blue, I have been collecting blue things since I was 17. They feel fated to me in that way.

Writing is writing, right? You have to write the words, but there is so much thought. I wouldn’t have been collecting blue things, if in the back of my mind I hadn’t had the question: What does beauty mean? What comfort do these blue things give me? That was a difficult question that I might have asked when I was 18, collecting blue glass. I amend that question over time, by the time you go to write, you probably have a lot of thoughts about it without knowing you have.

Please find the full interview at The Cut.