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Michelle Dean is one of my favorite critics, Eula Biss is a gorgeous essayist, as is Leslie Jamison. Anna Holmes is a really smart and thoughtful thinker. Right now she’s doing a lot of small-press writing but I have no doubt that she’s going to have a breakout year in the next couple of years. She is always impressing me with what she puts out. I love the writer xTx, who I just think is brilliant and fierce. Who are the contemporary writers whom you most admire? Q: You’ve got a seemingly insatiable appetite when it comes to culture that makes your essays particularly enjoyable, and this includes your reading tastes. I see how open they are to the process and I think, “If they can do it, if they’re willing to be that brave, then I absolutely need to be that brave.” Teaching encourages me to take more chances with my writing, to get out of my comfort zone and try different things. Teaching makes me a braver writer because I see the chances and the risks that my students take in their writing. How does teaching inform your writing and vice versa? Q: You’re currently teaching creative writing at Purdue. Writing and compassion are absolutely connected. It’s trying to understand experiences beyond my own and it’s also trying to show people who have endured experiences beyond my own that I am trying to understand what they’ve been through, that I’m trying to empathize with them. What connects compassion and writing for you?įor me, writing is entirely an act of compassion. Part of what makes your writing, both fiction and nonfiction, so accessible is a palpable, consistent strand of compassion running through all of it.
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Q: The essays in Bad Feminist cover a rich, entertaining variety of topics including Scrabble tournaments, movies, TV shows, violence, politics, humor, racism and feminism. Because there’s no flourish in a story like this. I also think we try to pretty-up suffering and violence and I was not interested in doing that, so I decided to treat violence as information-here are the facts of what this woman endured-and that really helped me to stay honest and to avoid unnecessary flourish. By that I mean that I never allowed myself to forget what the novel was about and whose story I was trying to tell that was important to me. You allow us to see the moments when the cracks show. In depicting Mireille Duval’s ordeal and its aftermath, you’ve straddled this incredibly fine line: You write about brutality with an unflinching, exacting clarity, but the narrative has this extraordinary beauty to it, one that allows you to access the core of your characters’ experiences. The magic here is the way in which you infuse myriad complexities -family, love, betrayal, home, migration, inequality, privilege, the danger of any kind of blinders-with equal weight. Q: Your novel, An Untamed State, is about a wealthy woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom in Port-au-Prince.
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So it’s been really overwhelming, but I’m going to figure out how to deal with it because it’s also really awesome. It’s been absolutely overwhelming because you work and you work and you work, and you wonder if you’re ever going to get your shot, and then it happens all at once at the most unexpected time. What does it feel like to have them both see published life at the same time? We’re seeing it as the year of Roxane Gay, but both of these books must be the culmination of years of writing, observing, thinking. Q: This is indisputably your year: a critically acclaimed debut novel, and an equally successful essay collection of cultural criticism that honestly, humorously and accessibly captures the multiplicity of your views.
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Steffens is a freelance journalist whose author interviews and book reviews have appeared in Time, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, Time Out and the U.K.’s Independent on Sunday. Gay currently teaches creative writing at Purdue University. Her debut novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of essays, Bad Feminist, were published this year to critical acclaim. This Q&A originally appeared in the fall 2014 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.ĭaneet Steffens ’82 interviewed Roxane Gay ’92, a writer and cultural commentator who has been published everywhere from The New York Times, The Guardian and The Nation to Slate, Salon and The Rumpus. Author of Bad Feminist and NY Times columnist