My next question is pretty related to the last one. They just go to that ugly, vulnerable place over and over in their writing and make their readers the better for it. My favorite, realest writers are xTx, Lindsay Hunter, Merritt Tierce, Taiye Selasi, and Randa Jarrar, to name a few.
So, I’d love to know, what writers and artists do you love that give us the real in full dose?
It’s a vulnerable position at times because it’s asking a reader to accept what is and sometimes readers don’t want to.
It’s what I’ve always loved about Sexton, too, she isn’t afraid to create personas that feel ugly things. The book unflinchingly confronts violence and real emotions as all part of the beauty of life. What I love about all of your work, and especially your book, An Untamed State, is that you are never afraid to face the real dead on. I also believe that we all get to a place where enough is enough and the pleasures we derive from toxic cultural artifacts is not enough to overlook the pain. It shouldn’t be so difficult for them and if it is, well, that tells us something. We have to encourage the creators to be better, to stay true to their work while also respecting women. That said, we also have to be literate enough to recognize the damaging messages of the culture we consume and we have to find ways to push back against more of such culture being created. We deal with that dissonance by accepting that we are human and that sometimes we want what we want, even if it isn’t good for us. ROXANE GAY: That dissonance between what we enjoy and what we know is a fraught place. So my question is: How do we deal with the disconnect of being drawn to culture that can be insidious with ideas that are seemingly against our own and what advice might you give us to deal with this dissonance? I feel inside and outside songs, poems, and visual art that might seem anti-feminist in tons of ways. I consider myself a feminist, but I also love all kinds of art that I technically “shouldn’t” and sometimes I find that hard to reconcile. I really feel this way, too, as we all love things we shouldn’t. Part of what I took away from the book was the marvelous idea that no one is a perfect feminist. In this installment, I asked five questions of the groundbreaking genius Roxane Gay.ĭOROTHEA LASKY: My first question is about your book called Bad Feminis t. I am lucky that I have the opportunity to interview the artists, thinkers, and writers who populate my own imaginative landscape, and to share our short conversations with you. Because imagination is both specific and universal, real and unreal, profane and holy, a place of both rest and unrest, that we all can go to and share with others when we make new things. It also helps us see the doors that connect all of our imaginations together. Everyone has their own imaginative landscapes, populated with very particular experiences, and when people open the door and let us into those places, it helps each of us connect with our own. This kind of talk can make people feel that if they don’t have immediate access to this single place, they can’t engage in imaginative thinking, which disempowers infinite possible new ways of seeing the world. People often talk of the imagination as if it is one thing for everyone, a place without context, a specific, singular landscape that we all go to. What governs this interview series is the idea of the imagination. I’m back now with the second of a new three-part series. I STARTED this column, “Five Questions and Five Answers,” by interviewing the mesmerizing Cassandra Gillig in 2014.