Maggie Nelson is a highly acclaimed poet, art critic, nonfiction writer, and professor. She is the author of several books including The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, Jane: A Murder, Bluets, and The Argonauts. Her work has received much recognition including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Argonauts in 2016 and most recently she received the MacArthur Fellowship. She currently teaches at USC in the English department.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Annie Dade. Annie is a Boston-based admirer of nonfiction, blended memoirs, and storytelling as a tool for social change. As both a student and a teacher, she has found deep appreciation for the craft in conversation with other writers whether they are third grade poets or college professors. She is grateful to speak with one of her favorite writers in this interview.

AD: What first drew you to writing in general and nonfiction writing specifically?

MN: I have written for as long as I can remember. It’s one of the only things that has ever come wholly naturally to me. I am not drawn only to nonfiction as a reader, but ever since I was very young (like, eight), I have enjoyed putting myself in the middle of a place and scribing what I saw or felt, which is a form of nonfiction writing. I was a poet for many years which is also a version of nonfiction, or can be.

AD: On a technical level, your writing is absolutely gorgeous. Even when you’re treating theory or recounting personal events, it reads like poetry. Is that an intentional genre-bending, or is that by virtue of being both a poet and nonfiction writer? Do you approach writing poetry and nonfiction in different ways? 

MN: Thank you. Nothing about that is intentional per se, in that I don’t devote much if any time to thinking about genre. But poetry and critical nonfiction definitely use distinct muscles.

AD: In your writing, you share details from your personal relationships. I’m curious about how you approach writing about other people. For example, in The Argonauts, you share a conversation you had with Harry after he had read the first draft of the book and made suggestions on how you “might facet [your] representation of him.” What did that process look like? And now that the book has been out in the world for a few years, can you share any reflections on publishing intimate details about another person and a relationship?

MN: If you write a nonfiction book you usually have to talk to people you’ve written about before you publish it, or at least to anyone you would like a continuing relationship with after the book comes out. Like all ethical matters, there is no blanket rule about how to go about doing this; it’s a situational sport. It can be no big deal or totally excruciating. My advice is to write and publish what you need to write and publish; also not to fool yourself that your writing has no effect on other people, so attend to that fact as you see fit. It’s OK not to please everyone all the time, or even most of the time, or any of the time. But that doesn’t mean I advocate total recklessness. Most of the time there’s room in between, and when there is not, you have to make your own judgment calls.

AD: In The Argonauts, you relate a moment when Harry calls you out for not writing about the queer part of your life. You respond that you “haven’t written about it yet.” The Argonauts feels like the culmination of years of thoughtful personal exploration, but was there a moment when you first realized that your journey through marriage and motherhood was going to be a book?

MN: I don’t relate to the idea of writing or living “a journey through marriage and motherhood”—I don’t think of those things as freestanding or self-explicating institutions, and thus would never angle a book or a life that way. But there was a moment at which I realized that a lot of the things I’d been writing—a long piece about Eve Sedgwick, musings on Winnicott, questions about homonormativity, diaristic writing about pregnancy and caretaking my infant son, an art essay for my friend AL Steiner—might work together as a single piece, and I started to try to weave them all together.

AD: I think that weaving process is another reason your work is so artful. I admire the way you approach lofty theoretical ideas and then ground them in personal experience. As a queer theory student and as a human navigating queer relationships, I sometimes get lost somewhere in the space between theory and practice. Can you share a bit about your approach and research process for blending theory with personal experience?

MN: I guess I never feel lost because I don’t think of those spheres as separate. Theory has never felt particularly lofty to me, and the every day has always felt to me ontologically vast. I don’t believe in using theory in order to plaster over difference and detail in order to make a point, and I always want to trouble the relationship between the particular and the general; it’s kind of an obsession of mine, actually, when I look back over my work.

AD: Yes, now that you say that I’m reminded of a line in your poem “A Halo over the Hospital” that refers to your work on troubling the passage between the particular and the universal. I’m curious, what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

MN: I can’t really answer, as I can’t imagine a different way of living my life. It keeps me alive and engaged, and performs metabolic labor that I apparently need to inhabit this earth. 

AD: In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

MN: It’s always challenging in different ways. Insofar as everything I’ve written has been quite different from that which preceded it, there’s always a new challenge. It would be awfully boring if each project didn’t pose its own formal and intellectual problems.

AD: That is so true. I’m sure your readers are excited to learn what problems your next piece will be grappling with. Are there any questions or problems you’re currently ruminating on or writing about as a next project, if you are comfortable sharing them with us today?

MN: TBA!

AD: Haha, okay we will keep an eye out! As a professor, how do you generally approach teaching?

MN: I love teaching, which is too various a terrain to summarize here. I will say that I started teaching grad students when I very young, in my mid-20s, so I felt kind of nervous at times; Robert Creeley, whom I idolized and loved, told me back then, Just treat your students as your fellow interlocuters, and it will all be fine. It was good advice then, and I’ve tried to follow it ever since.

AD: What is one thing you would tell aspiring nonfiction writers?

MN: Keep going! Keep reading! Eyes open!

AD: I love that, and I’m sure your students appreciate the motivation. Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

MN: I just taught Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, about undocumented children in the immigration system, and this passage moved me—it comes after Luiselli and her family have been stopped by Border Patrol in Arizona, one of whom is mocking them for being writers on a road trip:

Handing back our passports, one official says sardonically, ‘So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.’ We know better than to contradict anyone who carries a badge and a gun, so we just say: ‘Yes, sir.’ Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.