Reaching in the Dark: On Relevance, Resilience, and Reclaiming Voice

By Bailey Gaylin Moore

I was two semesters into my MFA program in 2016 when major social and political shifts had a direct impact on what I wrote. I got caught in bouts of researching, reading and rereading Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Helene Cixous. I thought—perhaps too much—about concepts like phallogocentrism, a Derridean term used to explain how language, and therefore meaning-making, is constructed by and for men. It’s a paradigm where any marginalized person lacks th...