Recording from Maggie Nelson's Word Works: Writers on Writing talk, "The Writing Body."

Nonfiction writing, particularly that of the autobiographical variety, poses a particular performative problem for the writer—that of locating the writing body in time. No matter what a text’s subject, its reader presumes that a coherent living body wrote the words now in her hands at a particular point in time. But how the writer invokes this living body is always a performance of sorts, in that actual writing takes place over time, in multiple locations, in ever-changing bodies. This talk by poet and author Maggie Nelson addresses how this variability appears or disappears into the fabric of our work by examining certain limit cases—Herve Guibert and David Wojnarowicz writing while dying of AIDS, Peter Handke writing in the crushing immediacy of his mother’s suicide, Beatriz Preciado writing during a yearlong experiment with testosterone, and so on.

Maggie Nelson: Writing the Body | Word Works January 28, 2016

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