I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.
I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability.
It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.
People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.
People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.
My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.
How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.
I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.
The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.
On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.
The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."
I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.
The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.
With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.
I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.
She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.
