S.

“It quickly became apparent to me that embodied writing is not in opposition to political writing. In fact, it is the kind of political writing that I am most interested in reading.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“[T]he idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What's that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything.
Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative