Maggie Nelson, The Art of Nonfiction No. 13

At home in Los Angeles with her son Iggy, 2012. All photographs courtesy of Maggie Nelson.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Nonfiction No. 13

Interviewed by Milo Walls

Issue 253, Fall 2025

Across three decades and more than a dozen books⁠—including the narrative documentary poem Jane: A Murder (2005); the lyrical sequence Bluets (2009), about heartbreak, pain, and the color blue; and the assemblage of essays Like Love (2024)⁠—Maggie Nelson has cast her relentlessly curious and sometimes maddeningly scholastic eye on love, art, narrative, embodiment, and form. Even her most academic writing has the bright hue of the personal. Her critical work assimilates a vast spectrum of sources in its forensic approach to monumental themes such as cruelty and freedom; almost all her books straddle genres, sometimes in the span of a single page.

She remains best known for The Argonauts (2015), a slender, allusive work of “autotheory” about her relationship with her partner, the gender nonconforming artist and writer Harry Dodge, whom she married in 2008, and her pregnancy in 2011 with their son Iggy. The book earned ardent praise for its rangy, capacious account of finding love and providing care within the imperfect systems of marriage and gender; it also inadvertently introduced the unsuspecting masses to Donald Winnicott and top surgery. It has since become a staple of liberal arts syllabi⁠—the gemlike apotheosis of the contemporary memoir boom, or its precocious child.

Nelson was born in 1973 in San Francisco; her father, an employment lawyer, and her mother, a housewife at the time, divorced when she was eight. When she was ten, her father died suddenly of a heart attack, a loss she has returned to in several of her books, most recently in the memoir Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (2025), about her history of oral pain and her ambivalence toward her own volubility⁠—as a child she was known as a chatty Cathy. She attended the Urban School of San Francisco and then Wesleyan University, where she studied with Annie Dillard and the feminist scholar Christina Crosby, both of whom became lifelong friends; Crosby, who suffered a life-altering accident in 2003, and who died in 2021, is a figure in several of Nelson’s books.

Nelson began her writing career as a poet and a scholar of poetry; her Ph.D. dissertation, written at the CUNY Graduate Center, was published in 2007 as Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. One can see, in the poetry books Shiner (2001), The Latest Winter (2003), and Jane, the eccentric forms and eclectic source materials that have come to define Nelson’s prose style. Jane is named for Nelson’s maternal aunt, whose brutal murder when she was a first-year law student in 1969 remained long unsolved despite the interest it drew from the true crime industry. The book became the first in what Nelson has retrospectively called a trilogy about violence and spectacle: The Red Parts, an account of the trial of the man belatedly accused of Jane’s murder, followed in 2007, and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning in 2011.

Our in-person conversations took place this past March over the course of three days in northeast Los Angeles, where we first met on the generous porch of the bungalow she referred to as her “MacArthur house,” after the prize she was awarded in 2016 for “forging a new mode of nonfiction that transcends the divide between the personal and the intellectual.” The home is convivial, boisterous, and inviting: vaulted ceilings, the aquatic glimmer of a swimming pool out back, and, in the kitchen, a California-size fridge featuring an assortment of domestic ephemera (a typed list of “positive childhood experiences,” a “Hi I’m lesbian” sticker, pictures of Nelson, Harry, Nelson’s stepson, Lenny, and Iggy). Elsewhere small objects convene by type⁠—a herd of miniature ceramic pigs meeting on the bookshelf, stones and stonelike orbs lining the white mantelpiece.

Our exchanges were punctuated by minor disruptions, including a Zoom call with her students at the University of Southern California, where she’s taught since 2017, the daily school pickup, the long glissando of a leaf blower (“You’re about to witness a Los Angeles phenomenon,” she warned), and the yap of Billie, her dopey and besotted poodle, whom I was gently informed I’d been misgendering. In response to my questions, Nelson was at once precise and discursive, friendly and skeptical, direct and elliptical. She had little interest in answering inquiries as to when and where she writes; my more personal questions were met with mild indignation, sighs, blushing, laughter, or the comment that she’d already written on the topic in hand. “I don’t know” became such a frequent refrain that at one point I was compelled to assert that not knowing seemed important to her, to which she replied, “Yeah, it is.” At such moments, I found myself thinking of Winnicott’s theories of the false self, the facade one advertises in defense of the private interior. But she was also emphatically unfussy, giving, and game. On arriving at her door in the rain, a stranger with suitcase in tow, I was furnished with lunch before I learned it was her birthday.

 

INTERVIEWER

Have you noticed that Bluets and The Argonauts spawned a certain kind of writing? I’m thinking of essays that might combine theory and autobiography in vignettes, but perhaps without the precision of your own …

MAGGIE NELSON

I’m familiar with the phenomenon, yes.

INTERVIEWER

What do you make of it?

 

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Nelson, at left, with her sister, Emily, in Sausalito, California, ca. 1976.

NELSON

There are various forces that can reduce rigor, which might include laziness or soft-headedness but more often have to do with insecurity or a desire to impress. The thing is, you have to really want to understand what you’re referencing. It’s easy to drop names⁠—as if “Freud” stands in for sexist villainy or something. I mean, have you read Freud recently? He’s just endlessly fascinating. I think people have a hope and a prayer that if they toss in a bunch of quotes, or⁠—and I certainly did not invent the numbered form⁠—add numbers to a piece, it will all magically hang together. But as a writer you have to be willing to say, Yeah, that’s not good enough, over and over and over again.

INTERVIEWER

What did that process look like for The Argonauts?

NELSON

Well, it took me a long time to realize I was writing a book. I had written two papers⁠—a tribute to Eve Sedgwick’s work and a piece on my friend A. L. Steiner’s art show Puppies and Babies⁠—and then I was just writing down things that seemed notable, interesting, annoying as they happened. A lot of my work has been like that⁠—I have to go on instinct as to why this particular anecdote might come to mind, and I don’t really know what the weave of them is going to make up. I recall that the first draft had a lot of petulance in it that I had to get rid of, a lot of low-grade complaint about gendered experience in the world. I had to make it so that the point wasn’t that I’d had an irritating ultrasound technician or that there was a weird person who wouldn’t take Harry’s credit card⁠—but I also didn’t want to just say, Maternity is a philosophical experience that everyone should be interested in. It’s like, who cares? There needed to be connections along the way, and a rising sense of stakes, to make it interesting not just as writing but as a series of thoughts. As Barthes writes, “Text I is reactive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes. Text II is active, moved by pleasure.” You have to work on Text I for it to lose its “reactive skin,” to get to Text II.

INTERVIEWER

Some people might imagine that your work consists mostly of arranging.

NELSON

I do do that. But whenever you do a kind of arranging project, people tend to talk about it as “collage,” as if the sequence of the material doesn’t matter. If Bluets and The Argonauts work, it’s because of the plotting that’s not visible, the order in which information is dispensed.

INTERVIEWER

What dictates the order?

NELSON

Bluets and Pathemata share a similar compositional principle⁠—which is maybe a little cheap, I should probably stop doing it⁠—where I’ll start telling a story and digress before returning. The numbers in Bluets⁠—and this is stolen from Wittgenstein⁠—sometimes mean that we’re following a hot proposition, but at other times they signify a total change of gears. When you write like that, the effort in revising is to read the manuscript like a dummy, like you’ve never seen it before, so you can test for when you’ve veered too far. It has to not be so far that the book goes slack, but there also has to be enough digression that you can get in a lot of disparate material.

With The Argonauts, the temporal structure was the biggest challenge. I had to ask myself, Is it tolerable that I’m pregnant on this page but I already had the baby ten pages back? There was also the structure that has to do with the history of ideas⁠—concepts that needed to be introduced before other ideas could be entertained, like Winnicott’s idea that, by necessity, someone must hold the baby well enough that it survives, and that person is not always the baby’s biological mother. I wanted to bring in, one by one, this symphony of people who might serve as mothers in one’s life⁠—the “many gendered-mothers of my heart”⁠—to lead up to the moment in which Harry’s adoptive mother dies.

INTERVIEWER

Did The Argonauts always begin as it does?

NELSON

I shuffled things around so much that I don’t know what “always” means, but at some point, all the temporal to-ing and fro-ing was killing me, so I decided to find the earliest anecdote, put a date on it, and let the text unfurl from there. I’ve read that some people feel that the start of the book is some kind of challenge or provocation⁠—“Here, decide whether to keep reading after this anal sex scene.” The thing is, I really, really hate writing that pulls its punches, stalls out in exposition that we don’t need, and so I liked how that particular passage felt very present, very alive. I wasn’t quite done with The Argonauts when I read Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and I felt a lot of kinship with its project, its vacillation between high theory and personal, sometimes very sexual chapters. The price for a sex scene in that book might be fifty pages about the history of the birth control pill⁠—which you’re into, and you’re happy to read, but then you’re like, Oh good, we’re back at the hotel. Barthes says that the erotic part is where the garment gapes. I like a lot of writing that’s full frontal⁠—I’ve taught whole classes on Marquis de Sade and pornographic prose⁠—but I probably do a little bit more of the garment gaping.

I might also have been thinking, in that opening, about Anne Carson’s writing on Sappho and the “sweetbitter.” Part of falling in love fast and hard is that at some point you hit the bitter, the chasm where you realize you’re two different people. I liked the way that opening had the fast part of falling in love, and that it could then be followed by a conversation about language that reflected the chasm.

INTERVIEWER

You write in the book about Harry’s resistance to the first draft, which you then revised. What were those changes?

NELSON

The good news is that it was so long ago I can barely remember. But it was important to me to know that he had signed off on the book knowing every word, that I was representing him in the way he had chosen to be known. I was already in some ways familiar with staging the ethics of representation from writing  Jane, although that was a very different situation, because she couldn’t speak for herself. I spent a lot of time worrying about writing about a dead woman who was like a figment of my imagination, about contributing to a genre in which a dead woman’s life is given meaning by her death. Of course, those sorts of questions kind of evaporate when you realize that you’ve set up the wrong problem.

INTERVIEWER

What was the right problem?

NELSON

The real problem wasn’t how to escape from some spectacularized look at violent death but how to understand its effects⁠—even on my sister and me, who were born after she died. Certainly when I wrote it my mother’s whole side of the family hadn’t yet achieved the state of grief where Jane could be talked about without summoning the specter of her murder.

INTERVIEWER

How aware were you, as a child, of the trauma in your family?

NELSON

Like a lot of people who have had a certain amount of luck in life, I wouldn’t have freely called anything I experienced trauma. I had a measure of economic privilege⁠—Marin County, where I grew up, was one of the richest counties in the country. I started going to private school in fourth grade. So I don’t think I would have felt I was allowed to associate myself with suffering. But I did notice that not many people’s aunts had been murdered by a likely serial killer. Then, obviously, when I lost my father, I felt very alienated from people at school, in the way that you feel when you suddenly have the tragedy stink on you. I started to feel different, heavier than people around me. And the escalation of stuff with my sister … She’s two years older than me, and she took another route with her grief, acting out her difficult emotions in ways that were more available to a teenager, and it got really hard for all of us. So, yes, it did seem like things were getting a little dramatic.

I wish I had two life stories, a set of interesting things I hadn’t written or said elsewhere, so I didn’t have to bore you or myself.

INTERVIEWER

Don’t you think we all have many? You write, in The Argonauts, that writers may return to the same themes, but “such revisitations constitute a life.”

NELSON

If you’re interested in the art of life writing, then one of your jobs is to continue to make your life new⁠—to tell your life through the lens of the color blue, or the shadow of a murder in your family, or mouth pain. But the facts of where you went to high school, or what your parents did … There’s no lens, no invention.

Maybe part of my resistance to talking biographically also comes from the fact that I might have done a little decentering of my childhood self, even some gentle blacking out. For a long time after I left home, I saw a vacuum when I looked back, and it’s taken me a while to fill in the picture, to put myself back in the scene enough to talk about it. In fact I had a great art teacher in high school who was very into Jung, who set us an assignment to make a picture of our childhood and its peak experiences, and the call to narrativize was so nerve-racking to me that I remember being almost paralyzed. I think I kind of liked what I came up with, but I was also frightened by it⁠—like, Boy, this looks pretty dark …

 

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With her father, Bruce Nelson, at home in San Rafael, California, ca. 1978.

INTERVIEWER

How did you understand your father’s death at the time?

NELSON

I don’t think I understood anything of it at the time. I’d been a dispositionally sunshiney kid, and it could have just been my age, but when my dad died, a lot of darkness was cavernously opened up. The fight not to get sucked into it became the reigning problem of my existence, though an interior one. I think there could’ve been a lot more acting out on my part, but I was saved by being intellectually engaged. I was pretentious⁠—I drank Earl Grey tea and read Patrick White, who I’d heard was one of Robert Smith’s favorite novelists. I was just following stuff I’d read in The Face. Luckily, I picked quasi-intellectual rock stars to be obsessed with.

INTERVIEWER

Who were the writers you were most drawn to?

NELSON

We had this frayed E. E. Cummings paperback at home, and I recall, when I was really young⁠—this is so weird⁠—taking it to the bathroom and reading the lines “the / moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy” and feeling the same thrill I might’ve gotten from jerking off or something. Like, Oh my God, this is an amazing simile. It’s hard to remember sometimes just how exciting language combinations were to me when I was younger. It was simple delight, an intensification of interest, a quickening. I gave my sister Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems for her eighth-grade graduation when I was in seventh grade⁠—I knew Plath was a famous poet whose dad had died when she was young, too. The inscription said, “Dear Emily, I hope you’ll take this with you for your whole life”⁠—of course, that copy ended up with me. I read a lot of poetry with one of my best friends in high school, Lhasa de Sela, whom I wrote an essay about after she died. Urban had great literature teachers, and so I graduated from Plath to Paul Celan and other poets of the midcentury. I liked philosophy, too, and I took summer classes in philosophy at UC Berkeley, thinking that was going to be my future, but the older I got, the more mathematic it seemed, not what I had in mind.

INTERVIEWER

Did your mother encourage your reading?

NELSON

I think my mother has for all my life been a portal to literature, a condition of possibility for my writing to happen and also for my keeping it kind of in reserve. Some of my privacy about my work probably has to do with the closeness of our relation. I started writing in earnest a year or two after my dad died⁠—it was the place for all the things I wasn’t going to share anywhere else. Like a lot of women who got divorced in the seventies and early eighties, my mother didn’t have a ready-made profession, but she had gotten a master’s in English literature and written her thesis on Mrs. Dalloway, and after she left my father she forged a career that partly had to do with running adult book groups. She’s very big on contemporary fiction, which I’ve never had much to do with. She also started working as a business writing consultant⁠—she had her own company, Nelson Communications⁠—and she was an intense editor, passionate about straightforward language, the need to make your point quickly, to use bullet points, to put the headline in the subject of your email. The sometimes obscurantist avant-garde that I became involved with felt like subterfuge, a betrayal of that whole modality, but I also imbibed a lot from her. I am a “say the real say” kind of person. I have a pretty good radar for experimentation with language versus obfuscation. Even within the idiom of poetry, I’ve always been attracted to writers, like Robert Creeley, or Celan, whose minimalism or urgency comes from a sense that there is no wasting of words, and that they are directly addressing the reader.

INTERVIEWER

What was it you were writing in those years?

NELSON

It’s funny⁠—no one goes this far back. I kept journals in high school, which in college became very florid with collage and painting. But I guess what I was writing then were my first forays into abstract feeling, trying to conjure the landscape of my feelings⁠—not so thematized and maybe not even prose-like. I recall, as a teenager, I submitted a poem to a competition run by the Cure.

INTERVIEWER

If I remember correctly from The Red Parts, the poem was an imaginative reconstruction of your sister’s loss of her virginity.

NELSON

So weird, right?

INTERVIEWER

What drew you to that scene?

 

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At right, with her friend Lhasa de Sela in Baja California, 1990.

NELSON

What was that about? I have no idea. As I remember, it was a scene of anguish⁠—I think it might have started with “Crying in my bed,” or something like that. I think a writer is often positioned near some chaotic event, being the scribe or else the person who reimagines what has happened, and maybe something like that was happening. But then, at a certain point, it usually becomes clear that all the observing and scribing of other people is not about them as much as it is about you. There’s a push and pull between being a good observer and asking, What is the rhythm of my attention telling me about myself?

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the spirit of the times you grew up in. Were you swept up in any movements or subcultures?

NELSON

No, none of the Bay Area subcultures held any interest for me. Marin County is a weird kind of rich, hippie rich, or at least it was when I was growing up. We lived next door to a member of the Grateful Dead, and we’d supposedly bought our house from the Doobie Brothers. There was a lot of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll hangover there, but also a lot of money. I didn’t like either. I’m a fast person, not a slow person, and hippieness always felt so unambitious. It seemed hypocritical, patriarchal in its way.

I did get into activism when I was really young. They showed us The Day After at school, so I started working at the Marin Nuclear Freeze, where, for some reason, they put me, age twelve, on the phones. Urban was very community-service-oriented⁠—the fourth period every day was service⁠—so I’d go to these various organizations around San Francisco, first Saint Anthony’s Soup Kitchen in the Tenderloin, then the Haight-Ashbury Soup Kitchen, then Greenpeace in the Marina, and later CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. When I got to Wesleyan, it was the Gulf War and, because I’d grown up in San Francisco, I felt worldly and jaded and was kind of a jerk. I was confused about why we were protesting at the college. I was like, Why wouldn’t you go to city hall?

INTERVIEWER

How did you choose Wesleyan?

NELSON

I really can’t believe anyone will be interested in this.

INTERVIEWER

Why wouldn’t they be?

NELSON

Just, who cares? But I ended up at Wesleyan because of Cynthia Nelson, who became my first girlfriend in college. It’s a story that I’m not sure I want to …

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested …

NELSON

Well, we’d shared a boyfriend in the Bay Area without ever meeting each other. I think he’d said about her, probably when I was in a fit of jealousy, “She’s just like you. She’s a Pisces. She writes poetry. She’s really into all the same music. But she left to go to this school called Wesleyan”⁠—which I’d never heard of, because I was a California person. But it got lodged in my brain that someone just like me went there.

INTERVIEWER

Did you come out in college? Did that have any utility for you as an idea?

NELSON

No, and I still pick the “Rather Not Say” box. My sexuality and, frankly, my gender are just as mysterious to me as they have ever been. At Wesleyan I found myself quickly alienated in spaces where identity was very policed.

INTERVIEWER

Policed in what way?

NELSON

You know, the kind of policing young folks do when they think that who you’re dating at a given time signifies something more broadly about your sexuality, which might not, in the end, be a rule. I was involved in a sexual assault education program that ran a seminar for freshmen in which we did role-plays involving back rubs and ways of maintaining your boundaries. It was all worthwhile, but I was confused about why, in these scenarios, it was always assumed that the women didn’t want to have sex and were the ones who had to fend it off. In Haight-Ashbury, where I’d gone to high school, there was this die-hard promiscuous spirit that was being disciplined by AIDS but that people were unwilling to give up. At school, we’d had assemblies where people would warn about the dangers of sex, but there was also a radical pro-sex-ness to that time and place. I thought about that dyad when I was writing On Freedom (2021), which was motivated in part by a fear that, if we push aside certain accounts and experiences, we’ll be forever in some fantasia where sexual desire and agency are shorn of the difficulties that seem to me constitutive of so much sexual experience.

INTERVIEWER

Were you already grappling with these ideas in class? What were you reading?

NELSON

I remember, in a feminist theory class, reading Sharon Marcus’s famous essay “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words,” in which she writes about rape as a kind of language that is used to reify old ideas about women’s inherent violability. I was fascinated by the kinds of analysis that would recognize those structures. Queer theory hadn’t really moved in yet, but it was a great moment for feminist theory, and Christina Crosby, my advisor, was a great teacher, although her feminist theory syllabus at the time was much Frencher, much whiter than it later became. It was a very heady scene⁠—postcolonial and poststructural theory, the death of the author. Christina had lived a varied life, working in a domestic violence shelter and doing other things, and she taught Marxist theory and the Victorians, so I took those, too. I most remember working on Luce Irigaray in her classes⁠—I was very drawn to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and to Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics. Subjectivity studies and its relationship to language were important to me⁠—Judith Butler, Denise Riley. Unsurprisingly, I was always drawn to thinkers who could allow for the strategic value of identification but also understand, maybe even in a Buddhist sense, the shifting sands of impermanence on which we all stand.

INTERVIEWER

Did you study creative writing, as well?

NELSON

Yes, and Annie Dillard was the creative writing program at Wesleyan. She taught by fiat, and on the level of the sentence she could be anything from a micro-scalpel to a hammer. I’m sure that to this day I don’t write as tightly as she would prefer, but I felt an affinity and I understood what she was trying to teach us. She’d set us writing prompts, like picking a place we’d normally never go and writing down everything that happened there. Annie was just an advocate of attention.

There was some hostility in English departments at that time, between the more theory-minded people and the creative writers. Annie would always tell me that the problem with feminists was that they told her she was going to get killed in the wilderness and that she didn’t want to live the life of fear that they were focused on. She was very down on a lot of my interests, but working with someone so quasidictatorial was instructive, even as I chose to self-liberate, to not let Annie become the superego of my writing. What a lot of people experienced as a war between the rise of continental theory and a belles-lettres-loving literature, I experienced as a pleasure. Obviously, it has been borne out in my work that I like to shuttle back and forth.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start to do that shuttling back and forth in a single piece of writing? Could you do that in college?

NELSON

I do recall another prompt that Annie set, to write an extended metaphor without letting on that it’s a metaphor. I seem to remember writing something embarrassing about spelunking, inspired by Irigaray and women and the unknown … But I really put the two together in my thesis, which was about the performance of intimacy in the work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality was all the rage, and I wanted to use his critique of the “confessing society” to ask what the discourse around so-called confessional poets has to teach us. I was interested in what I would’ve called postconfessional autobiographical work, and so I was doing my own version of that in poems I wrote, which I put at the start of each chapter, and in a chapter of just poetry at the back. I even had a poem in there called “Villanelle to the Critic,” addressed to critics of confessional literature. Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath had recently come out, and that was my bible. Rose puts forth the idea that the critical scene surrounding Plath, or any subject, could be a repetition of the dramas that the text itself is about. It’s an approach that lets you analyze the scene in a relation of transference. What have we made of this person and why?

INTERVIEWER

How do you think about your own critical reception in relation to your own performance of intimacy?

NELSON

People have recently asked me that about “The Slicks,” an essay I published on Plath and Taylor Swift⁠—whether, in writing about their scenes of reception, I was also grappling with my own. The thing is, I don’t think it’s healthy for a writer to spend much, if any, time thinking about the scene of her own critical reception⁠—which one can never see clearly, anyway. I did like thinking about the whole Tortured Poets Department thing, though, because it came on the heels of what appeared to be a very painful love affair that was then transmuted into art and performed for millions of people, and that seemed totally fascinating. I don’t have fame like Plath or Swift, but the microscopic windows I’ve had into it have been interesting. It’s easier to remain in the openness that you need as a writer when you start off, or it was easier for me. There’s nothing like having several French interviewers in a row ask, about The Argonauts, “Why do you call what you have a family?” Or in the UK, where they’ve got a lot of TERF issues, having journalists warp things you’ve said about gender to serve their purposes. People are constantly asking questions that really mean, How can you persist in being this naked? Aren’t you ashamed and humiliated just to be here? And you think, No, I’m good, but you seem pretty worried.

INTERVIEWER

When you’ve responded to my questions with disbelief that people might find parts of your early life relevant, where does that hesitation come from?

NELSON

I’m probably not alone in thinking that the most interesting things about my life are my books. Part of me has always wanted to hide, and then to impress people on the page. I’m reading a biography of Barthes right now for a class I’m teaching on him this fall, and I said to Harry the other day, “God, I wonder if this class is going to be boring.” Harry reminded me that my worry was because I wasn’t reading Barthes’s books, was thinking too much about his life. I’m totally lost without that third object. I think that’s always been true for me. When I was in college, I did some research for David Lehman, who was writing his book The Last Avant-Garde, at Frank O’Hara’s archives in Connecticut. I’d known a little bit about the New York School, but not a lot, and that research probably led to my own dissertation. But whenever I was in the archives, I felt almost dirty, and wanted to go back to the published work.

 

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In front of her apartment building on Orchard Street in New York, 1996.

INTERVIEWER

Was it inevitable that you’d end up in New York after college? Were you going there to find what remained of the New York School?

NELSON

I’d already spent a summer living in Cynthia’s apartment on St. Mark’s after she graduated and while I was still in college. Eileen [Myles] had come to Wesleyan the year they were running for president, just kind of blew in to show that there was this whole other way of learning how to be a writer, and in New York they taught workshops that were advertised on flyers⁠—they were run out of different people’s apartments. I remember one in the apartment of Anne Iobst, who was half of Dancenoise, and one in the Midtown loft of the painter Bill Sullivan, who ran Painted Leaf Press. Eileen was making a strong claim to the genealogy of the New York School but also acting as a bridge to a very young and queer scene that they almost brought into being by writing toward it. Although, and this ended up being the focus of my dissertation, that so-called minor part of the scene had always been there. I’d been frustrated by how a book like Lehman’s, which had chapters on four male figures⁠—O’Hara, Schuyler, Ashbery, and Koch⁠—undersold the women and the queer element. I wanted to understand what it was about literary and art history, besides just patriarchy, that expels women.

By the time I got there, the scene seemed more punk. I took a class with Bernadette [Mayer] at the Poetry Project, where I curated the Monday-night readings when I was in grad school. I’d been a dancer at Wesleyan, and in New York I’d go to these open-performance-contact-improv jams and get to dance with real physical geniuses, like Jennifer Monson. The feeling was of radiant intelligence coming into your body. “You had to be there for it” was the entirety of the point for dance, and for the poetry stuff too. Eileen was very instructive in the art of moving the energy of the room around, changing what you’re going to read at the last minute based on the vibe. Alice [Notley] was an amazing reader⁠—her speed and her devotion and her high-pitched intensity were very moving to me. The enthusiasm and pleasure and stimulation that drove the New York School was important to me, and, although I’m not in the middle of all that anymore, I think I now re-create those feelings in my work, by bringing together people who seem exciting to have at the party.

INTERVIEWER

Were you writing a lot at the time?

NELSON

I wrote tons. I don’t know, it was the nineties, man. Rubber cement and collages and real typewriters. I had five typewriters. I had an italics typewriter! You’d just tip-tap into the night. I did letterpress at the Center for Book Arts when it was on Broadway. I took a workshop there with someone who taught me how to use tampon tubes to bind books. People don’t believe me when I say this, but self-publishing really was the coolest thing to do. Cynthia and I published a book of poetry together in 1996 called Not Sisters⁠—we had the same last name, so we were always having to say, “We’re not sisters, we’re dating.” Cynthia was in bands, and Soft Skull, who around that time did books by Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth and John Hall from King Missile, put that one out. Soft Skull basically operated out of a Kinko’s at the time. You could go to St. Mark’s Bookshop and they would take anything on consignment.

INTERVIEWER

What did you do for money?

 

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With Adrienne Truscott on the roof of her Orchard Street apartment building, 1996.

NELSON

I worked in restaurants and bars the whole time I lived in New York. I started at a French bakery, Marquet Patisserie, on East Twelfth, then moved to waitressing and bartending, first on the Upper East Side, serving rich people. We’d make a bunch of money on the shift, say three hundred dollars, and we’d play a game where we’d walk from Hunter down to the Lower East Side and just go into bar after bar after bar, tipping really heavily all the way. The goal was to blow all the cash you’d just made. You could start dropping forty-, sixty-dollar tips and give it back to other bartenders, because you were all part of the same community. I paid my rent in cash. It was a very simple economy. My rent was three hundred and seventy dollars and my bills were sixty-five. The rest I could just spend.

My longest engagement was at the Great Jones Cafe, which was a well-known bar off the Bowery, around the corner from Time Cafe and Joe’s Pub. People I knew in performance would come in after shows. I dated the chef for years, so I was very involved with the place, even during my Ph.D., God help me, but it was also a very heavy drinking environment. There was a lot of dope. It could be a heavy scene. I worked there for many, many years.

INTERVIEWER

You include a letter from Bernadette Mayer, in your book about the New York School, in which she tells you not to go to grad school⁠—“better to be a carpenter.” What was it that persuaded you to go?

NELSON

That was her generation⁠—they really believed academia was the death of freshness. I think my generation was probably the last one where it was not cool to get an M.F.A. I didn’t know anyone who wanted to be a writer who’d gone to grad school. But I wanted to do the kind of scholarly and critical writing that wasn’t being held by my poetry life, and CUNY felt like a good compromise. The CUNY system was full of exiles from the Ivy League, people like Wayne Koestenbaum and Luke Menand, who had public dimensions to their intellectual lives and were pursuing their own thing. I wanted to be like them, I guess. Plus, I wouldn’t have to leave the city, and I would, you know, get smarter. Eve Sedgwick, who had left Duke, was very committed to Tibetan Buddhism and was interested in textiles and touch and the haptic⁠—stuff other than the high queer theory that she’d been known for in previous incarnations. I became interested, through Mary Ann Caws, in the historical avant-garde and in Artaud, whom I wrote about in The Art of Cruelty. Wayne kept getting wilder and wilder, making paintings and video art. I started to study the relations between different art forms, and how to teach and write across forms rather than focus solely on literature, which didn’t feel entirely like my jam.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

NELSON

I don’t like literary. That’s probably self-preservationist, but it feels bleak to have only that one talent and be in an environment that’s built around it. It’s important to notice when the spark of magic or curiosity is there and what snuffs it out, and being around too many writers, for me, snuffs it out.

INTERVIEWER

And a Ph.D. didn’t?

NELSON

I kept writing poems⁠—Shiner and The Latest Winter came out before I graduated. And I started writing  Jane while I was there, which I now think of as a portal book. I needed to deal with that story in order to become the next, evolved version of myself. My aunt, too, had gone to graduate school, and I saw, from looking at her diaries, that the youthful insecurities that had dominated her earlier years started to dissipate as she studied law. She had overcome that Doris Day, Midwestern, marry-well mentality. She was going to be a civil rights lawyer. I saw myself as being perched between generations⁠—so many people I knew in New York were rad and wild, but I knew I still had to reckon with the lineage of compliance that Jane, like many people assigned female at birth, including my mother and sister and me, had also come from.

For a long time I didn’t show Jane to anyone⁠—for years it didn’t look like much⁠—but I remember telling Mary Ann Caws about my struggles with it and her saying, almost flippantly, “Pain will find its form.” That somehow became my mantra while I was working on it⁠—that, even as I was confused formally, it was okay, because pain would find its form.

INTERVIEWER

How did the pain find its form?

NELSON

I had only ever written poetry, so it felt natural to start trying to tell the story in poems, but it was such a hard story to contain narratively that I sometimes thought, Why am I doing it this way? The narrative was threatening to break the poetry, to make it really boring and bad. I wrote a paper in grad school called “The Art of the Long Wrong Poem,” about Anne Carson and Alice Notley, and I remember, writing  Jane, that I felt jealous that Carson had found this visual look for Autobiography of Red⁠—the long line followed by the short line⁠—and that Notley had found a wild new measure to score her Descent of Alette, marking off the phrases with quotation marks so that she could keep the beat in her head. I wanted to participate in that kind of epic discourse, but I couldn’t muscle Jane into a homogenous form. William Carlos Williams’s Paterson was important to me because of its motleyness⁠—that poem has lists, block charts, letters. And Alice, whom I was interviewing for my dissertation, had written an essay about the female epic⁠—her brother was a war veteran, and she had watched him and her first husband die from drug- and alcohol-related causes. Instead of just inserting a woman into the hero’s journey, she was asking, What is the heroine’s journey? What do women do? I think one of her answers was, They dream. She’s much more of a mystic than I am, by far, but I’ve always written down my dreams⁠—I have my first dream journal, from when I was five or six, in my fire go-bag here⁠—and some of her ideas gave me sculptural ideas about what could happen in Jane. There’s a poem in Jane about a real dream I had about my sister, where she’s dead at the bottom of a pool and I’m following after her. I was thinking about Alice, and The Descent of Alette, and Jane, a girl who, unlike my sister, didn’t make it.

INTERVIEWER

You describe, in The Red Parts, the state of “murder mind” in which you lived during the writing of Jane. Why linger there?

NELSON

The timing of The Red Parts was very peculiar because, just as Jane was going to print, my aunt’s case got reopened, and when Jane came out, the suspect had been taken into custody. I was pretty exhausted after a kind of strenuous year in the murder business⁠—lots of  book events about violence and death⁠—and a year of teaching at Wesleyan that had made me suspect that my degree had been an error and that academic teaching wasn’t for me, that I was going to be stuck in a system that demanded I write peerreviewed articles about poetry. A relationship had ended, and I’d moved to Connecticut in part to be close to Christina, who’d had her accident the year before. It ended up being a very hard year in a million ways. But my mom and I decided to attend the trial in full in the summer, and so it went on because the story was going on. I was in a prose mindset from my dissertation, and I wanted to give reportage a try, kind of like Emmanuel Carrère does, finding the avant-garde in it. After the trial was over, I moved to LA and just wrote up all my notes. I didn’t have any friends there and people didn’t go out, so I’d just write till I fell asleep, go to work, come home, write.

INTERVIEWER

Do you share your work in progress with anyone? Have you had good relationships with editors?

NELSON

I do have a couple of friends, including Ben Lerner, whom I might send some things to. The fundamental question that Ben and I often have for each other is “Is this alive?” or “Where is it alive?” We made an exchange of The Argonauts and 10:04, both of which are engaged in a conversation about futurity and have to do with a pregnancy. Ben is very conversant in all the genres that have mattered to me, so we could trade theory about reproductive futurism but also, maybe because we both started in poetry, neither of us wants to let the other write a bad sentence. I recall, when I was growing tired of The Argonauts and nearing my deadline, he told me, “This is the point at which I tell you to order one very large iced coffee and go through it one more time with a pen.” I like that kind of encouragement.

I’ve been well edited, but as you may have gathered from this interview, I make attempts to be affable while there’s a very headstrong person right under that affability. I trust my ear and I trust my ambitions, and I don’t really like early editorial input in any fashion whatsoever. And any time someone has suggested that the kind of book I was describing couldn’t or shouldn’t be pulled off, it’s made me think, I’ll show you. The Red Parts is the first and last book I tried to sell with a book proposal. I had written something up that was all about these competing notions of justice and how they’re mediated by violence and … whatever. No one bought it. Most editors said, “Come back after the trial.”

 

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From left, Iggy, Lenny, Harry, and Nelson, at home in Los Angeles, 2012.

INTERVIEWER

Was The Red Parts the book you planned to write?

NELSON

In some sense, The Red Parts is the most Trojan horse book I’ve ever written. The thing is, if there’s a court trial happening in your family, that is interesting, but the intensity of your interest can be explained only by what it’s connecting to, the historical sediments in your self. I do believe that the language you use to precisely describe the things you see tells you everything about what’s on your mind. You have to put a Freudian faith in the detail⁠—that it will lead down the royal road to the unconscious. Writing The Red Parts, I became very interested in the homicide detectives’ descriptions of how to approach crime scenes. One of them drew me a spiral on a piece of paper to explain why you can’t walk in a straight line to the body⁠—you’ll miss all the clues. That image seemed to me like the roundabout journey of writing a book⁠—and I eventually realized that it was not my aunt’s body that the book was moving toward but my father’s.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel like you understood something differently about the loss of your father through writing it?

NELSON

I think so, but what’s been so strange about writing books about my own life is that whatever I understood by writing each book has integrity only for the self I was then, whereas the journey is ongoing. I write about this in Pathemata⁠—how, at the beginning of the pandemic, I asked my therapist whether she thought I should write a letter to my son in case I suddenly had to get intubated and died. She told me not to, but she said, “What if you tried writing a letter from your father to you instead?” She smartly saw that there was something that still needed to be resolved. One of Pathemata’s questions is “What is safety?” or “What is a safe feeling?” and, writing that letter, I realized that safety is not about bad things not happening⁠—it’s about whether you’ve ever had anybody, even an invention, an ancestor, or a spiritual presence, who could make you feel accompanied and calmed in this life. I think my dad was that kind of force when he was alive. My sister and I leaned on him a lot for consolation. For a long time, when I revisited his death in my work, it was just to write about the pain of losing him, not about the goodness of the person that he was. But if I have any stability, I think some of it is what my father managed to give to me in ten years, which wasn’t that long, but it was actually enough.

INTERVIEWER

What is it that keeps you coming back to the second-person address?

NELSON

I think for me it’s a holdover from lyric poetry⁠—there’s a lot of heat in the second-person address. I’ve always been obsessed with Dickinson’s Master Letters⁠—is she writing to God? To a critic? To a lover no one knows about? In Bluets, I wanted to teeter between the second-person address and this other state where the beloved “you” is removed⁠—because if you’re writing to no one, the sound becomes hollower and hollower. What you get is the rhetorical nonpresence that is more common in philosophy, which is the voice of yourself thinking alone.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that the speaker of Bluets might be dead. Is she?

NELSON

Well, technically. I mean, she says, “When I was alive.” In my mind, she was speaking from the beyond in a certain way. I was very taken with David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, although I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten through the whole book, which is embarrassing. But in that book, you don’t really know what happened to the world, and the narrator doesn’t know if she’s the last person in the world. I was interested in that disembodied space, which I also associate with Emily Dickinson.

On a more spiritual level, Bluets was a book where something like a new life was being born for me. After Jane and The Red Parts, I felt so far from beauty that at first I wanted to write something like Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, full of pleasurable vignettes about beautiful things, like notes you might jot down before bed. I also have all these little books on color⁠—David Batchelor’s Chromophobia is one I love. But if you read Bluets carefully, you’ll see it’s also a sobriety narrative, although that isn’t the only narrative. People who’ve been in the program will encounter phrases like “there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging” in a different way. Saying goodbye to somebody I loved, moving to a new city … there were a lot of selves that were being shed, and so, in a sense, I really didn’t know who was speaking anymore.

 

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With Christina Crosby at a salon to celebrate Crosby’s book A Body, Undone, 2015.

INTERVIEWER

Was it difficult to quit drinking?

NELSON

No. The years or months leading up to it were not pleasant, but the actual decision to stop drinking … Eileen was probably the first person I called. There’s a lot of kinship between alcoholics, recovering alcoholics, ex-alcoholics⁠—even if you’re still drinking, you see sober people as possibilities of what you may one day become. You collect these cards in the back of your mind. You don’t even know you’re doing it.

INTERVIEWER

What was the decisive moment?

NELSON

You’re practicing your Terry Gross. I’ve written about this somewhere, too⁠—I was on a writing residency in Vermont, trying to write Bluets, and there had been a chain of events, a lot of walks to the supermarket for wine. Whatever had been working with alcohol was no longer working, and it became clear that it never would. The mindset that told me that a life without alcohol would not be worth living, or that I wouldn’t be able to live it, was a category error brought about by a substance. The thing is, quitting has to come from something deeper than rationality. It has to come from a true exhaustion and an interest in what else there might be.

Looking back, The Red Parts, and, to some extent, Bluets represent for me the end of a certain kind of reckless energy. Hopefully it doesn’t come off in the writing as bravado⁠—but I think I was more invested then in being the person who looks at the tough thing, who doesn’t avert their eyes, who, come hell or high water, will take in all experience. I still have some of that, now that I think of it. When Christina was dying, I asked her partner to take pictures of her, as there was some part of me that doesn’t want anything to pass by without … I need to see it, you know?

 

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With Annie Dillard at Dillard’s house in Cape Cod, 2022.

INTERVIEWER

Was there any difficulty in looking at cruelty in art?

NELSON

Not really, because I only picked things to write about in The Art of  Cruelty that I thought were pretty interesting. I did notice, while I was working on the book, that people would bring me stuff that they thought I’d be into, and often I’d think, Oh Lord. That is not anything I can deal with at all. I remember going to a Luther Price screening that included actual surgical footage. Not my jam. I had a scholarly interest in transgressive work and its history, as well as in Modernist shock aesthetics, from Benjamin to Artaud. I’d been in New York for 9/11, and the hip critical theory after that had to do with violence and spectacle. But it took writing The Art of Cruelty for me to figure out that, while there’s a lot I’m attracted to in what is formally lacerating, I’m not particularly interested in the brutal itself. Teaching at CalArts put me in touch with legacies of embodied performance that shed light on the highly subjective experience of cruelty. When Carolee Schneemann strung herself up with a harness and pushed herself against the walls, for example, she thought of it as a work about freedom.

I’m not a philosopher, really, but something in my work always seems to come down to these questions. In Bluets, for example, I was exploring how pain is both abstract and corporeal, and, of course, entirely subjective⁠—which means it threatens to separate us. It was important to me to let Bluets be a book about multiple forms of pain, without disciplining them with any kind of shame⁠—I was very moved by Christina’s example, the way she, like a lot of greatly suffering people, wanted to hear about my problems because they set her mind off her magnificently bad problems of having become a quadriparalytic. Similarly, if you’re a Marxist, you could try to be empirical about discussing degrees of freedom, but I do think that part of the difficulty in considering freedom comes from the question of whether it’s a condition or a feeling. There’s something about the discourse of false consciousness⁠—“You think you feel free but I’m here to tell you that you’re not free”⁠—that’s always really bothered me.

INTERVIEWER

How did you contend with the formal problems of writing about such an abstract concept? There are an immense number of voices in On Freedom.

 

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With Harry in Sonoma, California, 2022.

NELSON

I remember lying in bed and coming up with the first sentence, “I had wanted to write a book about freedom,” and realizing, This is going to be interesting. Already I was noting a challenge or failure. To deal with this problem of subjectivity, it was important for me to bring a lot of different discourses and registers into the same room. I’ve always enjoyed mash-ups, like Arendt writing a letter to Baldwin about a piece of his in The New Yorker, or Fred Moten looking at what Kant, whom some people would not associate with writing about race, did in fact have to say about the matter. And I was trying to take people’s provocations seriously, not just put a stamp on them. In the drug chapter, for example, I quote from some weird libertarian writing about drugs⁠—when I first encountered it, I was like, Oh, if you’re having a good-faith conversation with a good-faith libertarian, not a quasi-Nazi libertarian, there are actually things to talk about. I’ve been reading Anand Giridharadas’s book The Persuaders, in which he describes the challenges organizers face in “deep canvassing,” which is a form of going door to door where the main goal is to stay “long enough to surface something different,” which in this case means staying for thirty minutes. This kind of work requires a lot of self-regulation on the part of the canvasser, so that they can remain engaged no matter what crazy or upsetting shit they hear. Anyway, it was a hard moment in which to write On Freedom, but I wanted to ask, How do you do the work of self-regulation that is required to have a conversation? I grew up around Buddhism, which I was very drawn to but also used to judge, because I worried that there was something in focusing on acceptance and the self that would turn you away from action, from making change. But the longer I live, the more I become interested in why we should perceive there to be a choice between self-work and world-work.

INTERVIEWER

Do you meditate? What has Buddhism meant for your writing?

NELSON

I do. I’ve noticed that, when I’ve been working with ideas that can seem contradictory, I sometimes find that I am in a grip, holding on too tight, feeling that a choice needs to be made or that two things can’t coexist. In Buddhism, the grip is a form of suffering, a sign that you are not apprehending a situation clearly⁠—you might ask yourself not how to reconcile the polarity but how to hold it as it is.


Source: the paris review