Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Q [Library Journal]: Compared to your process for writing fiction and nonfiction, what was different writing the memoir?
A [Viet Thanh Nguyen]: My nonfiction has been scholarly, and there is little benefit to being vulnerable, emotional, or subjective in scholarship. To survive in the academy, I had to tamp down any signs of vulnerability or emotion and to present myself purely as a rational, objective, theoretical intellect. No body, no feeling, only highly controlled thought. For a woman, or a person of color, to do any less is to open oneself to the colonizing, racist, sexist assumption that feeling is less than thought, body is less than mind, spirit is less than intellect. So I had to undo a lifetime of Westernized education to allow myself to write a memoir.

--In an interview about the author's forthcoming book A Man of Two Faces, due for publication in October 2023.

Dr. Janina Fisher

If it's not happening now, it's not happening.