I enjoy interviews for following the life and directions of the interviews but also for the interactions and playful exchanges, maybe even banter or camaraderie, between the person interviewing and who receives the prompts of their questions.
So, there are a few sentences in the exchange on Electric Literature between Rutter Walker-Bowman and Tracy O’Neill that stir me inside:
Language can also be beautiful, and I am so obsessed with the more beautiful power language that I often want it to overcome everything else. It doesn’t. I hate that.
I keep finding myself delighted by vernacular, I’m attentive to word choice and how and when people, both those who are close to me and those who are strangers or other sorts of new, show some other facet of themselves. The words that come out of your mouth are no different than the eyeglasses on your face, how you spend weekends (and weeknights, for that matter). It’s what we choose, and what constitutes style that is also affected by where we situate on a spectrum of sameness or distinction.
This bleeds and pumps into another passage how we must all refuse to the confines of being a singular character, identity, or way. To not see ourselves in such a belittling way, and to not subject ourselves to be around people who see us one dimensionally. This truth for our lives reminds me of the metaphor that the creek is never the same — perpetually changing from what it was earlier today and how it used to be. Endlessly, infinitely new:
we are all viscous and performing to some extent—but also changing over time.
I like this language of viscous characteristics. And yet, we possess some constants that endure over decades:
we do contain firm aspects of selfhood and accrete new ones as we continue to experience more.
Some of my firm aspects —what I define as what has survived over decades—include:
- My sweet tooth and how my stomach will lead me places I wouldn’t go if I wasn’t on a search for food;
- Asking questions;
- Fostering meaningful connection;
- Mathematical prowess and ease;
- Relying on maps and visualizations to ingest and share data;
- My fondness for R&B and soul music
The Wikipedia page for O’Neill includes a quote from a 2020? interview with SoHo Press, stating:
Being an Asian-American woman in a predominantly white society has made me attuned to the simultaneous illegibility and hypervisibility of my body, the watchedness that I mentioned is so important to the book.
The dual, contradictory essence of being illegible yet hyper visible.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 