A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

PORTAL , 2018

Linda Lê has noted that writing shapes her identity more than any origins or affiliations, a knowledge which she claims allows her to occupy with ease the illegitimate spaces between homeland and adopted country, between belonging and unbelonging. But Lê’s work regularly stages the encounter between writing and not writing—juxtaposing the writer and the blank page, inspiration and silence—and figures the act of writing as a symbiotic relationship between a parasite and its host. This paper will examine these themes in two of Lê’s novels: Un si tendre vampire (1987) and Conte de l’amour bifrons (2005). Focusing on the figure of l’oiseau de mauvais augure and drawing on the dialogues between Lê and the silenced writers to whom she looks for inspiration in her nonfiction essays, I will present the inability to write not as the opposite of literary inspiration, but as it’s double. The double is an equally recurrent image in Lê’s writing, often represented by the figure of Janus, or the God of beginnings and endings. I will suggest that the bird of ill omen is another Janus figure, the (imagined) presence who embodies both inspiration and its loss, and who is the necessary double within each writer.

2019

Tesserae: Essaying fragments of a life, 2018

Tesserae' enacts its own content, being a lyric essay about memory, brokenness and how lyric essays can both tell a partial story and open up questions about this story. The mosaic is metaphor and subject, as the narrator remembers moments from her childhood and intimates their effects on her later life, and on her writing. The work aims to demonstrate how the lyric essay form can support life writing that embraces narratorial subjectivity that is complex, fluid, contingent and relational whilst still adhering to Lejeune's (1989) 'autobiographical pact'.

The Southern Literary Journal, 2000

The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2023

In this essay the author explores divorce and the internalization of the hustle and grind culture in academia from a Chicana lesbian perspective, arguing that writing as resistance (hooks, 1990) using testimonio (Cruz, 2012) provides a bridge of affirmative epistemological exploration into remembering and reclamation that is necessary for healing and liberation. The author elucidates throughout the essay how her social location and relationship to testimonio and writing as resistance situates her within the genealogies of Chicana lesbian writers (Trujillo, 1991) and Black women writers (Morrison, 2020; hooks, 1990; Lorde, 1984) showcasing that writing is an ongoing dialogue with self and others that co-creates connections within and across communities that is necessary for bridges of healing to hold us up. The author asserts herself as a part of a new generation of Chicana lesbian writers who are compelled to explore one’s interior landscapes that coalesce with exterior circumstances through writing. The essay ends by focusing on the path of conocimiento (Anzaldua, 2002) to demonstrate how younger generations of Chicana lesbians are taking up a critical engagement of introspection. In doing this, the author showcases that nourishment1 is essential to interrupt logics of domination (to shift), to change and heal (inner works), and to practice sharing knowledge (public acts).

TEXT, 2013

I must first describe the puzzle, for many matter-of-fact people will be unaware that there is one: when a writer, this writer and many like me-though not allis deep in a creative work, the mind, no matter how well-disciplined it has been in the normal course of life, takes on a new and most unruly life. This seemed to me, when I first experienced it in my first novel, Painted Woman, somewhat shameful, because after all one stands before the world with a book which despite the mind's unruliness comes together as an intellectual tour de forceor is it not despite, but because of? And the experience seems somewhat indescribable, except in quasi religious terms. Of course I'd read about the muse, but that seems to me the province of important 17th century poets, never of my struggles. Writers resort to the word "channeling", for example, or say to indulgently smiling audiences, "the book wrote itself through me". I made the mistake of explaining that I seemed to have "stolen" my novel, which made people mutter. Fearing a call to the police, I thereupon kept silent. Nevertheless, I came to depend on the mind's strangeness through the writing of more novels, stage adaptations, and short stories, and it was at the back of my mind when I interviewed, with Kate Grenville, nine other novelists for Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written [1]-though at that stage I didn't know how to put into words the questions that puzzled me. Since its publication in 1991, I've taught creative writing at a tertiary level and encouraged many generations of students, who not uncommonly went on to be published, to allow their minds to do the same. I must confess my classes seemed to me at least, almost séances. But I'd been charged with showing people how to invoke the muse, and I took my duty seriously. Then came a fateful phone call, luckily in the middle of a difficult writing day in the middle of a novel that seemed mired. (I've described this problem and its resolution elsewhere [2].) The caller was a PhD student who wanted to interview me along with six other writers, to ask us about our processes because... and here my memory blurs, for he carefully described his hypothesis but used terms that at that stage, had no meaning for me. But, glad of the distraction, I said yes. The interview was nothing like I'd ever had. The questions were eerily reflective of the way I work, and what I teach. His questions were also startlingly specific. For example, he knew that for writers, thoughts come singly and then in flurries, with the sensation of the mind tumbling: he knew that sometimes, deep in the work, whole pages seem dictated-and then, sadly, the dictation stops; that creative thought is often experienced as being located, not in the skull behind the eyebrows, but in particular parts of the body. "How do you know this about me?" I finally blurted. Dr Christopher Stevens' reply was the bibliography to his thesis [3], and from this chance meeting I learned that cognitive psychology, followed by neuroscience some time later, has been considering the cognitive and neural

Although psychoanalysts have used psychoanalytic concepts to understand issues of writer's block as it affects the work of artists and writers, we have largely neglected the process of psychoanalytic writing per se. The author's personal relationship between self, text, and community is used as an initial contribution to the development of clinically near imaginative theory as well as to facilitate the generative authorship of others. The difficulty inherent in the arrogance of a creative thought-embodies one's envy, competitiveness, and destructiveness with her forebears and contemporaries-is considered.

2011

The pieces in The Healing Art of Writing bring together caregivers and patients who share a passion for writing about the mysterious forces of illness and recovery. A belief shared among all contributors is that being cured of a disease is not the same as being healed, and that writing poetry and prose brings us to a place of healing. Our subject is the body, our medical experiences widely diverse; our goal is to express through literature what happens when a physical or mental anguish disrupts our lives. Copyright Information: Copyright 2011 by the article author(s). This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs4.0 license, http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Perspectives in Medical Humanities

Post-Global Aesthetics: Twenty-First Century Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Edited by Gesine Müller and Benjamin Loy, 2022

Pourquoi ne cesse-t-elle pas d’écrire?—Amid a global pandemic, unprecedented environmental catastrophes, feminicides and genocides, rampant socioeconomic inequalities, and an increasing number of forced displacements, Blanchot’s question returns with the wit of a provocation, if not with the weight of an accusation. The accusatory tone may prevail in light of the ever-growing number of writers—critics and literary practitioners alike—who insist not only upon writing, but upon writing about writing. The premise of my essay is that the defense of both literary practice and criticism depends largely on the robustness of our answer to the question: “Why keep writing [about writing] literature?” I will rehearse a response to this inquiry by looking at two 21st-century Latin American novels: Rodrigo Hasbún’s El lugar del cuerpo and Conceição Evaristo’s Sabela. Both Hasbún and Evaristo’s works feature fictional writers who reflect upon their writing processes whilst their own sense of worldliness crumbles: in the case of El lugar del cuerpo, the protagonist explores what writing might mean from the perspective of a "yo" shattered by the experiences of migration and assault; in Sabela, the narrator explores the potency and the perils of transcribing the collective memory of an environmental catastrophe which threatens her community’s ancestral bases. Although the characters’ reflections are catalyzed by scarring circumstances, writing is not rendered as the suture of trauma or as a means to an end, but as an always-ongoing process whose value lies precisely in the pliancy and unexpectedness of its itinerary. Furthermore, writing is depicted not as a solitary, self-enclosed activity, but as a porous, erratic, and transformative praxis sensitive to its surroundings. From the characters’ viewpoint, to write means to venture into an embodied experience radically open to rather than severed from the ecology that envelops it. I argue that this permeability and its unpredictable outcomes are most welcome in a (post-) global cultural economy which, amidst the corrosion of its material grounds, still feeds on the reification of the self and on the commodification of well-contoured identities. In this context, following the trails of permeable, open writing trajectories might not bring about the fascinating absence de temps or the kairotic disruption of the political, but it may help us grasp the texture of subjectivities in process, the dynamics of worlds in ruins, and the potentialities of ecologies in the making.