Bethany M. Maile | Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis | University of Nebraska Press |...
Don’t you get bored? they’d ask me about like the 5K, 10K, all the distance stuff, 25 laps around the track. I would be so bored. No. I don’t get bored, I was already bored. Pain distracts you from being bored and god do you need that.
Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories.
He beamed like he was telling me he wrote for a living, like that exists.
As a member of the St. Olaf Choir, I spent a lot of time on concert stages in a purple velvet robe, nude hose, and a pair of black, smelly flats—smelly because all the women’s shoes traveled in the same trunk from tour venue to tour venue, to limit the risk of someone violating the strict dress code during performance.
21. When you say you’re going home, they ask: To Belgrade?
22. For them, it’s as though this war hasn’t happened.
And yet,
23. There are exceptions.
In what ways is a manuscript an exhibit? In what ways are these words animate? Maybe you understand these pages as an artifact, sacred words from an NDN; or maybe you read me as a sex worker of language, one who strips and fucks the page and spills himself all over it?
It is impossible to leave and it is impossible to stay, because your life is here, because it will not have you, because you carry it, because it is fragile.
This desert basin, here, or volcano crater, there, exist outside language—yet they’ve become places, narrated by discourses of nation, produced through imaginaries of space.
Grace Olmstead | Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind | Penguin Random House | March 2021...
The municipal fire alarm sounded, and the town of Lodi stirred.