Aidan

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“It quickly became apparent to me that embodied writing is not in opposition to political writing. In fact, it is the kind of political writing that I am most interested in reading.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative