Maggie Nelson was born in California in 1973, studied in Connecticut under the writer Annie Dillard, and now teaches and lives in Los Angeles with the artist Harry Dodge and their children. She is the author of numerous works of poetry and prose, in which she examines questions of desire, sexuality and family, often in a fragmentary, genre-blurring style. Her books include The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, The Red Parts, about the murder of her aunt Jane, and The Argonauts, a bestseller which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bluets, a series of personal meditations themed on the colour blue, has recently been staged at the Royal Court theatre in London. Her most recent collection, Like Love, features conversations and essays going back to 2006 about writers and artists including Wayne Koestenbaum, Kara Walker, Jacqueline Rose and Björk, who told Nelson that “when I read your masterpiece The Argonauts, I absolutely beamed with hope”.
In a piece in the book, about the poet Alice Notley, from a decade ago you describe your energy as “exhilarated despair”. Is that still the case?
I don’t really identify with that phrase as much as I used to (though I still think it applies well to Francis Bacon, and many other artists whom I love). Despair passes through me, of course, but I wouldn’t characterise it as my main station. The key for me is to see both hope and despair as moods that come and go, and to sense that underneath them there is something larger and more mysterious that remains unchanged by how we feel about it.
