Maggie Nelson is the author of five books of nonfiction and four books of poetry. She currently directs the California Institute of the Arts MFA program in Los Angeles.

Last February, Maggie Nelson visited Oregon State University to meet our MFA cohort and to read from her latest book, The Argonauts. 45th Parallel Social Media Manager Verity Sayles and Assistant Editor Maggie Anderson caught Nelson before the reading to ask her thoughts on crossing genre, reader experience, and improvisational dance.

Verity Sayles: At 45th parallel, we’re interested in the in-betweenness – work and thoughts that cross genre lines and challenge content. What value do you see in both maintaining genre distinctions and blurring them?

Maggie Nelson: You know, I’ll never understand why people are even interested in cross-genre work when your starting point as a writer should just be like total freedom with whatever you want to do, and take from anywhere – to me that’s a very natural stage, it’s not like a “learn about genres, then cross them,” it’s more –

VS: It’s not like a conscious decision. Like, “I’m going to mix these two things.”

MN: No, it’s really like the content of what I’m working on eventually dictates what it looks like – I’m thinking much more about the content and not really the formal experiment if that makes sense. I did a panel with Claudia Rankine last year at AWP, and when someone asked her a similar question, she said “it’s just by any means necessary.” It’s just like, you get it done. I think some questions about genre only make sense to consider after the fact, after having solved your aesthetic problem.

I remember Lydia Davis was out at my school recently, we were talking to her about the prose poem, and short, flash fiction stories, and she was saying they work on a story logic rather than a prose poetry logic, but if you wanted to call them prose poems, like, whatever. I understood what she was saying. There was something she was playing with about narrative logic, which is not the same as prose poetry, you know? And I think different genres do specific things. Poetry and prose work really differently to me. People have called Bluets a poem, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t have line breaks, so to me it’s not a poem. I think it has an essayistic logic.

VS: Okay, question number two: Imagine an alternate reality where people can experience exactly one emotion per piece of literature. In this world, what single reaction to The Argonauts would you most want your readers to have and why?

MN: Oh my god. (Laughs) Wow, I don’t know, I think having a single reaction seems impossible. I think I can’t answer that because I think with this book in particular a lot of people have asked, “Who did you write it for?” or “What’s the political strategy?” or whatever, and they’re questions that seem quite separate to me from the writing, and since the book has so many moves in it, it would be really weird to me for anyone to have one feeling. But the feeling of the book to me, which I think is true of all my books, is one that is open to wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory thought processes. And also one that can hold things people sometimes think of as opposites. Like it says on the book copy, “caretaking and freedom.” So I guess an openness to paradox, and maybe an openness to thinking.

Maggie Anderson: Well, how about another alternate universe, where instead of one single emotion people feel all of the emotions? All of the things at once?

MN: It’s really interesting to me how you learn about readers by what feelings they have, especially in a book like The Argonauts where a lot of people who are very familiar with, or in, the universe where I’m coming from have felt really grateful to me. Like the day the New York Times published a review, I heard from a lot of friends who were like, “Our families get a day on the page,” and they felt really recognized. There are a lot of people out there who are confused, bewildered, horrified – some haters, some whatever –who don’t have any clue and they feel like the book is far out, and the last feeling they’re having is recognition and gratefulness. But to me that’s very instructive and it wouldn’t make sense to have everyone feel recognition because that would iron out the kind of radical difference between people’s life experiences.

MA: Because it’s totally dependent on where they’re coming from, right?

MN: Yeah, and I feel it’s homogenizing – I don’t like politically the idea that “no matter who you are, we all share love” because while there’s some truth there, obviously, that universalizing sentiment has been used as a bludgeon for people who are different for a long time. Maybe parts of that are true, but I would never want to leapfrog over to that place – to hope everyone felt like that – because they would miss that maybe all love isn’t experienced quite the same, or maybe what I’m describing is not quite the same as their proprietorial logical forms of, say, parental love. So it would be not only very weird, but also politically problematic if those differences weren’t addressed.

VS: What is the worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

MN: That’s a great question. At the risk of sounding fogeyish, like, “Oh, they were right when you thought they were wrong” or something, I wrote this book, The Art of Cruelty, and I dedicated it to Annie Dillard, and it’s because she always used to say “Be careful what you put in, because that’s what’ll come out.” And I thought that notion of caution, especially in my twenties, was, you know, ridiculous – to exercise caution at a time when you want to take in everything or pursue the kind of more reckless or far reaching corners of your interest. So I dedicated that book to her because now I realize she was right. The book is a record of twenty years of taking in avant-garde or difficult boundary pushing art, and it’s what came out. (Laughs) You know? So I think she was right. But I think the notion of exercising too much caution on that account was probably one that I clearly rejected. (Laughs)

MA: You rejected it then, but do you still reject it now?

MN: Well, I believe what you put in influences a lot of what you put out, so I think like, it’s okay to binge watch three series of television as opposed to reading Henry James or whatever, but it is going to have an effect on what comes out.

MA: That’s so funny because I was thinking on the drive up here, like, I would really love it if Maggie Nelson was a secret Taylor Swift fan or something.

MN: (Laughs) Taylor Swift’s alright. Like I said, I don’t participate in the sort of puritan ecology that Annie was propagating. But I do think that about, on a literal level, the kind of sentence structures that one reads. Like how a lot of people say if you stop reading poetry you might stop producing it, and I personally find in my life the more prose I teach, the less I have the poetic kind of impulse – like if I’m driving in a car to suddenly feel like I’m getting a poem – but if I’m teaching a poetry class the urge will come more often. There are these kind of mystical ways your enmeshment of things influences what is possible for you to write, so I’m not puritanical about it, but when I choose classes to teach I do think, “What do I want to have coming in all semester, because what do I want to have coming out?” Because it’s gonna come out. It just is.

VS: That’s great, and it sort of segues into our last question, which is: So what do you do outside of writing and teaching? What are some of your passions and interests?

MN: What else is there to do? (Pause) I like swimming.

VS: In a pool, or…?

MN: In a pool, you know, other bodies of water are good, but I don’t have access to them all the time… A good Cape Cod pond is the best kind of open swimming to me, with white sand and beautiful fish down below.

Right now I feel like art has taken up an enormous amount of intellectual time as opposed to literature in my life, because I’m married to an artist and I teach at an art school and I live in a city in which art is a greater cultural force than literature. But I mean, really, between writing and teaching and taking care of my kids, there’s really not much time for swimming. So I swim when I can get to it.

I used to be a dancer and I used to be a lot more enmeshed in bodily practices like ballet and yoga and other things. What we used to call touch club, you know, contact improv.

VS: What is that?

MN: It’s usually called a “jam.” Like a real movement jam, and there are certain, not rules, but sort of credos that have been established in the contact improv world, ways of approaching somebody else’s body.

MA: What are they?

MN: Usually people start with surfaces, I mean you’re not going to be like, frontally grabbing someone. And then there are ways that you learn, through classes, about lifting people that make you able to lift like, a six-foot guy on your shoulder or whatever.

MA: Have you lifted a six-foot man?

MN: Oh sure! When I lived in New York both socially and aesthetically the dance world used to be a big world for me, and a lot of people that I admire the most are still into dance. But that’s not a huge part of my life anymore.

MA: I’ve been really curious about contact improv, and totally terrified by it –

MN: You know you wear, usually, kneepads. You buy them special, they’re like a contact kneepad, they’re very thin. It seemed like the most normal thing to me in the world until I started to get out of that world and describe it to people, and they’d be like, “You did what every Monday night?”

I know a lot of people in writing who get tired of their solitary writing life and then over the course of their career they get more and more into collaboration, but I feel like I did so much improvisational dance before, and now it seems really intimidating…

MA: You were the reverse?

MN: A little bit! I started really open in so many ways, and now I feel like if you don’t improvise in public often you can get more and more self-conscious, and now it’s very difficult to imagine performing in public, whereas I used to do a lot of improvisational dance and had no worry about it whatsoever… I have a several friends in LA who write for TV, and they all do writers’ rooms, this communal writing, which to me is like, unthinkable.

There’s a part in The Argonauts where I use some of Harry’s, my partner’s, writing about his mom dying, and some people in interviews have asked, “So at what point did you decide this would become a collaborative work?” And I’m like, “Collaborative? Collaborative like I took a found text of his and put it in my book?” Or the idea that because you show somebody something and ask for their permission to write about it, it’s suddenly a collaboration? I’m like, that’s what nonfiction is! No one in nonfiction really publishes whatever they want, you always have legal or personal issues, so that doesn’t make it collaborative support, it just means it’s ethically fraught. I think the only difference is that, in this book, I showed the hand of that a little bit more. But every book has that process.

V: Right, even if you’re not necessarily talking about someone you’re familiar with, or have met on an intimate level.

MN: Yeah. I was just doing this event with Ken Corbett, he’s a professor of psychology at NYU, and he has this great book about the murder of a transgendered kid that’s he’s just written. It’s called A Murder Over a Girl and since they’re rereleasing a courtroom book of mine, The Red Parts, this spring we’re going to do an event. So I was rereading his book on the plane and I was feeling a lot of kinship with the fraughtness of our 2 projects—like how you [as a writer] go to a trial and you take notes on what people are acting like and then you are publishing things about these people who are brought together in this incredibly fraught moment where they’re on trial, and their loved ones are on trial, and you’re talking about their grief, or what they look like, or what they’re wearing, and it’s really – it hasn’t happened that often, but the couple of times I’ve been written about by other people, it’s been really instructive because it’s really unpleasant, and really easy to get things wrong. And you guys are in nonfiction, I’m sure this is like your bread and butter of problems…

VS & MA: Yeah.

MN: It’s always a challenge, as it should be.