Get Outside

“The role of the writer is to be the outsider. Writing is under the domain of Mercury, the trickster. And yet I increasingly see American writers deep in this pull, with the MFA culture and the snug domesticity and the atheism and the insularity and the dismissal of radical voices and the nostalgia and the lack of any deep philosophical or emotional or historical views. It’s all rooted in the Self, and pretending like that Self is not in the grips of these unconscious, magically-loaded stories that go unquestioned. And we get so caught up in words, the importance of using exactly the right words and not using the wrong words, without looking at the stories we are telling with those words.”

—Jessa Crispin