Essayists From The United States

"You may regard this as an outrage of the spirit, but it is that or die, and I decline to offer you the choice."

"“You are enjoying the present disruptions a good deal less than I. That is because I recently restructured my cerebral architecture—that skill is my raison d’être, I should explain—and have adopted an egocentric consciousness, which certainly changes one’s view of the world!” The creature laughed, a shocking sound. “I’m presently as selfish as any human; probably worse, since I am not used to this heady wine. As any infant.”"

"Consider the as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything?"

"But such indifference to doctrine accompanies a lassitude toward all progress. The commonfolk still tolerate appalling injustices, because to them social evils are merely steps on the pathway to moksha. How can you help people who think the wretchedness of their poor is divinely appointed?"

"“Altruism can be surprisingly gratifying,” it remarked. “No wonder humans dabble with it.”"

"Humans are deceitful, enthralled to the sexual strategies that drove their animal ancestors and drive them just as blindly. They jostle and kick for social supremacy and mating opportunities, fitfully aware of how this appears yet unable to transcend it. They injure their societies in the interest of those few with whom they share genes, and will injure them in pursuit of opportunities to breed further. They are suspicious, irrational, and destructive, eventually to all but most immediately to those unlike themselves."

"Influence follows close upon the heels of character; and whatever we are, that we shall in the end be acknowledged to be."

"I begin to understand that a white woman of the South can live and write, but not of the dead heroes. She can live and write a new kind of honor, the daily, conscious actions of women in true rebellion. ("Rebellion")"

"I wrote that poem ["All the Women Caught in Flaring Light"] because, at the time I was writing the book [Crime Against Nature], I would read at women's cultural spaces and lesbians would come up and tell me heartrending stories. I felt a responsibility to tell some of them. I guess it's what happens when you're a writer in a culture of repressed groups...I think the concept of writing or art as just self-expression or self-fulfillment is a Eurocentric and sterile patriarchal idea...Because it goes only one way. And it's not a way of conceiving of art that acknowledges that you are able to make art only because things come to you from your community. The image of the individualistic, egocentric artist-white, male, and heterosexual-is premised on him creating all by himself in defiance of his culture. But that's not how I have made my art, nor is it how most people in repressed cultures create. You make art only in the matrix of your community and you're pretty foolish if you don't think that that's true. Responsibility isn't a grim thing, you know, in that context. It's just what's real You are fed, and you feed."

"I don't think about my writing as being about fame. I think of it in a communal context. Yet it's naive and apolitical to deny that elements of privilege accrue to visibility. Certainly, a visibly lesbian artist is doing something that many lesbians can't do in their own work lives. That visibility is the result of community building, of something that is given to the lesbian artist from the lesbian community. When I think about these issues, it seems all the more reason to be scrupulous about how to return things to the community and to place my life in perspective. I've worked hard, but I certainly could not be doing this by myself. The other thing I know about power is what I've learned from Audre Lorde, who said that if we don't use our power, it will be turned against us. I think there is an important distinction between power over and power with. I'm interested in how we develop power with others. I think it's important that my having access to my own power in my writing doesn't mean draining it away from the community or using it in opposition to others but, rather, using my power collectively with others to build a transformative future."

"It's important to deal directly with lesbian issues, whether or not one does that as an open lesbian teacher. It's important not to just shove lesbian issues to one side but to deal with them head on in the classroom, especially if one is teaching women's studies. The controversy right now is over a woman teacher bringing lesbian issues into the classroom. In another era you couldn't be a married woman and teach. It really is about what's acceptable to do as a woman occupying a position in an educational system that's supposed to be a replication of heterosexuality. Before you even start talking about what books you're going to use, you have to be ready to address that root premise."

"I understood finally that this heroic will to endure is still not the same as the will to change, the true rebellion. ("Rebellion")"

"I look on Native women's writing as a gift, a give-away of the truest meaning. Our spirit, our sweat, our tears, our laughter, our love, our anger, our bodies are distilled into words that we bead together to make power. Not power over anything. Power. Power that speaks to hearts as well as to minds."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"For the Native, queer, feminist, literary world: Beth is a home, reminding us that we are not alone in our movements towards liberation."

"words are sacred"

"Mother, I am gay. I have AIDS." The telephone call that it almost killed him to make. The silence. Then, "Come home to us."

"Beth Brant is a writer of great depth and brilliant talent."

"Her life was too short, like so many of our people. Colonial poverty and oppression took away some of our best sons and daughters. Beth left early, but she had accomplished so much. She inspired a generation of two-spirited authors who followed her to publication. There would be not have been a Johnny Appleseed without there first being a Beth Brant. There would have been no Connie Fife without Beth Brant. There would be no I Am Woman without Beth Brant. We were feminists when everyone objected. Feminism is a white thing, they said. Beth's response, so is patriarchy, and then she told us about the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an Iroquoian woman that sparked the suffragettes - made sense to me."

"Beth had an understanding of the road to freedom, the path to love, and the story we would have to create to get there. The pearls in her stories lie in a shell of words that need only to be opened; read Beth's work and we can all come together, transgendered, heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, fluid gendered, disabled, and abled, white, and non-white. We do not have to be stuck where corporate colonialism consigned us. There was room for everyone in Beth's heart. We can reach out and resist. The world is ours; we just need to go get it. This was Beth's philosophy."

"Oral tradition requires a telling and a listening that is intense, and intentional. Giving, receiving, giving-it makes a complete circle of Indigenous truth. First Nations writing utilizes the power and gift of story, like oral tradition, to convey history, lessons, culture and spirit. And perhaps the overwhelming instinct in our spirit is to love. I would say that Native writing gives the gift of love. And love is a word that is abused and made empty by the dominant culture. In fact, the letters l-o-v-e have become just that, blank cyphers used frivolously to cover up deep places of the spirit."

"Two-Spirit writers are merging the selves that colonialism splits apart."

"It has been two days since they came and took the children away. My body is greatly chilled. All our blankets have been used to bring me warmth. The women keep the fire blazing. The men sit. They talk among themselves. We are frightened by this sudden child-stealing. We signed papers, the agent said. This gave them rights to take our babies. It is good for them, the agent said. It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know civilized. (from "A Long Story")"

"Homophobia is the eldest son of racism; they work in concert with each other, whether externally or internally. Native lesbian writing names those twin evils that would cause destruction to us."

"Beth Brant gave us Indigenous feminism and Indigenous queer theory even before we had a name for these practices, all wrapped up in the most beautiful storywork."

"The old women are gathered in the Longhouse. First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes, the lips, the top of the head; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river through a canyon. (beginning of "Native Origin")"

"Beth saw her writing as an enacting of responsibility-the responsibility to help bring us all to the knowledge of how to live with integrity, as good human beings: in balance, centered in the heart's knowledge, hopeful, not vengeful, not small, but with generosity. Whether she achieved this in her own life to her own satisfaction, I don't know, and it is not mine to say. But in my view, that is where her writing is meant to take us: to ignite the imagination, to provide it with a kind of knowledge about how to care about those who suffer, and about how to walk in one's full posture, in a sacred way, looking at the world with vision."

"The years spent in the freelance trenches eventually paid off; I would go on to have some remarkable assignments. I've toured the great s of Italy, gone on a mock honeymoon in Hawaii, driven an across the , all on someone else's dime. Whenever people ask how they can get those same kinds of assignments, I recommend what worked for me: eight years writing freelance articles for ."

"If all fairy tales begin "Once upon a time," then all graduation speeches begin "When I was sitting where you are now." We may not always say it, at least not in those exact words, but it's what graduation speakers are thinking. We look out at the sea of you and think, Isn't there some mistake? I should still be sitting there. I was that young fifteen minutes ago, I was that beautiful and lost."

"“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ ” My father said that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but, as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now."

"I'm always writing essays—eight hundred words on owning a for a newspaper in London, my ten favorite books of the year for a magazine in Australia, an introduction for a newly reissued classic, maybe a little piece about dogs. Essays never filled my days, but they reminded me that I was still a writer when I wasn't writing a novel."

"In ', talked about how she spent her childhood thinking that real life would start after the surgeries stopped."

"Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape."

"Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here."

"and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of , situated on the in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer."

"My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out s and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice."

"As a , I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work."

"... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done."

"I like to use language to try to explain who I am and what I think of the world...That's the purpose of writing, to find out what you know in order to think."

"Anthropology has always been the handmaiden of colonialism all over the world. Not just here. Not just in Indian Country. Everywhere."

"Mendoza was a little man; puny, you might say. But that was not the reason he took two Dilantin every day. Nor was it the reason that he carried with him quantities of multivitamins, which he ate like candy throughout the tedious days and sleepless nights. The puniness may have been the effect, rather than the cause. In any case, you noticed the smallness of the man right away. What you didn't notice at first was the other thing...the indefinable thing that made you forget about him as soon as he passed out of your field of vision. It was as though you saw him but that he wasn't really there amidst the bus passengers when you looked away, and it wasn't your eyes fell upon him later that he became real. That thing, whatever it was, Mendoza knew. And he tolerated it."

"the truth is democracy has failed. In Indian Country, we've known it a long time. America hasn't come to that conclusion yet. But I'm not talking about the kind of democracy that has been imposed on Indian nations, which in itself is fairly criminal. When you put democracy in a broader sense, capitalist democracy is not going to proceed as it has in its exploitative way because it is not sustainable."

"At the time when descendants of Goethe had begun their massive, secret march through Belgium, in those years before the United States entered World War I, there lived near Fort Pierre, South Dakota, one Joseph Shields, a fifty-year-old Sioux Indian who in his own way knew something of the rise of brutal doctrines, something of the destruction of ancient civilizations, something of a change of worlds."

"I had this grandmother who said this to me earlier, "You don't even own your own life, my dear. You're only taking care of it for the next generation." That's fairly profound when you think about it. It is really what the Dakotas think about themselves and the world. It has, on the one hand, been their weakness because it's been exploited. But on the other hand, it is also their strength. It is what will make them, in the end, the winners in this conflagration. We're not protesting so much as we are saying: we have the right to our place in this universe. Maybe I'm the last generation of people who talks like that. The young people ought to think about it once in a while."

"...myth, mythology, is the body of knowledge a people possess. That's not a very satisfactory explanation. But a myth is not a story. Mythology is the body of knowledge. It's usually expressed in symbols. One of the most important ones is language. Our mythology is embedded in our language. Okay? The way we express it, however, is kind of a literary thing. We express it through ceremony. We express it through, which is the way you say, "I am a Lakota." Or, "I am a Dakota." Or we express it in ritual, which is the way you talk to God. Or you express it in storytelling. Or you express it in dance, art, and music, and so on."

"One of things you have to have, if you're going to be a voice in this dilemma, is you have to have a core of knowledge, I guess, or a core of something. And my core is, historically speaking, there are no two sides to this history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives. No human right, no human being has the right to do that to another human being. That's my core resistance. I don't do that to you or to you or to you. I very often go back to that. What directs a lot of my writing is: there are no two sides to this story. That's not very scholarly. It's not acceptable because there are two sides to everything, maybe this and maybe that. Part of the empirical evidence that history tells you is that for a while this was true and now that's true, and so on. That's the empirical evidence. That's not the evidence that I use. I say, there are no two sides to this story. What America has done is criminal. And they're still doing it. Sooner or later, a capitalistic democracy is going to be seen for what it is. It's simply not going to be sustainable."

"No matter what kind of verse a woman writes, nobody alive or dead deserves to be called a poetess."

"The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes."

"Whenas in perfume Julia went, Then, then, how sweet was the intent Of that inexorable scent."

"One gender to walk the wide world in Is the feminine, A plight that — softly to a friend — I can recommend."