Radical Vision Maggie Nelson
Through her poetry, essays, and art criticism, Maggie Nelson has proven to be a singular and indispensable literary voice. Critics like to classify her work as unclassifiable. An expansive thinker, she blurs genres but looks and questions deeply. Nelson has engaged subjects as varied as the color blue, the murder of an aunt, and, in The Argonauts (2015)—a book she has referred to as the product of twenty years of reading feminist and queer theory—the nature of love, family, and intimacy with a gender nonconforming partner.
“Certainly I would like my books to do something paradoxical,” Nelson has remarked, “which is intimate things that fall outside of categories, or language, even, by being exceptionally clear about what I see, think, apprehend.” Speaking here with artist Shannon Ebner, Nelson shares a dialogue about art and ideas, revisiting the influence of Virginia Woolf and looking ahead to Nelson’s newest book.
Shannon Ebner: When I was reading the Hilton Als New Yorker profile of you, he revealed that your mother had written a dissertation about Virginia Woolf. That’s such a wild fact; did that have any influence on you?
: The weird thing is, I’ve never read her thesis on Virginia Woolf, and I’ve never really talked to her about Virginia Woolf. My mom’s thesis symbolized to me that my mom is a great reader and thinker, and also that she was (1925). So in some way, there’s this weird thing of, like, Virginia Woolf being my mom’s last deep enmeshment in something that I went on to do.
