Latest Samantha Hunt Quotes from Interviews

• As a writer I feel more like a filter than a performer. I absorb and observe and then I name scatterings of stars into constellations. I don't usually spend time asking whether the stars are random or planned. I make a narrative in the darkness, the area subscribed by an outline of bright points. Sometimes they look like Ursa Minor, and sometimes they just looks like one day the world exploded.

  Samantha Hunt

  Darkness, One Day, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• As a teenager and into my early twenties I lived in a geodesic dome on a mountain. No running water, no phone, real rustic. I loved it. One night, there by myself, I was terrified. I was up in the loft trying to sleep but I couldn't because I was so scared to be that alone. I knew I'd never lose my fear if I didn't address it so I went outside in my undies and waited for the darkness to come and kill me. But it didn't. It was beautiful and calm and even kind. I went back to bed eventually.

  Samantha Hunt

  Beautiful, Running, Real

  Source: therumpus.net

• I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

  Samantha Hunt

  Art, Optimistic, Optimism

  Source: therumpus.net

• The lion's share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

  Samantha Hunt

  Forever, Listening, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's definitely a voice and I always speak my work aloud. I have a lot of old people in my head, most of them dead now, but I always hear how they would say things, my grandparents and my neighbors.

  Samantha Hunt

  Grandparent, People, Speak

  Source: therumpus.net

• One last important influence I'll mention is Flannery O'Connor. In high school I shoplifted her Complete Stories. Having read "Good Country People" for class, I really just felt a home in her work. I had little guilt about the theft at the time. I sucked in my stomach and shoved the book into my pants. It's very big. I can still feel how it cut into my body in the most exciting way. Clearly, I don't feel guilt-free about this crime anymore - I wouldn't be mentioning here, looking for some absolution if I did.

  Samantha Hunt

  Country, Book, Home

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

  Samantha Hunt

  Writing, Trying, Speak

  Source: therumpus.net

• John Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is very important to me as an influence. When I didn't know how to start Mr. Splitfoot, I just wrote the first line of As I Lay Dying instead and then continued on. It's dissolved in the text now, but it helped me start.

  Samantha Hunt

  Important, Dying, Influence

  Source: therumpus.net

• I am very bad at remembering the books I've read and so recently I had a wonderful experience. I decided I wanted to teach Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I hadn't read it in twenty-five years. I was surprised to find how much I drew from that book. Stole from that book, learned from that book about writing. I had forgotten and there it was. Morrison has called that text faulted. I cannot see how.

  Samantha Hunt

  Book, Eye, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• The first time I took my daughters to the ocean - and I love the ocean but where we swim is very rough, very New England, rip tide, not messing around ocean - and a thought arrived: I was asking my daughters to slowly recognize death, just dip their toes in its fathomless edge, to know it is there, even in the night when we don't see it and that it, in its mystery and largeness, in its terror, is the thing that makes life precious, magnificent and full of never-ending curiosity.

  Samantha Hunt

  Daughter, Rip, Ocean

  Source: therumpus.net

• There is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness. Mothers are experts in these fields. I hope people can learn to listen to them, learn to be like them and acknowledge the wisdom there before it is too late. I hope people can learn how to serve others.

  Samantha Hunt

  Mother, Kindness, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think I write mostly about death and so it is interesting to hear how often people think I'm writing about pregnancy and birth. Though of course they are two sides of the same coin. Both when I was pregnant and now as a mother, I am consumed with thoughts of death. This is a strange role in parenting. The death guardian.

  Samantha Hunt

  Mother, Pregnancy, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• Discourse about motherhood is chillingly narrow-minded. It's a tool the patriarchy uses, of course. So people complain about their kids or they complain about the pain of birth or they make motherhood kitschy, Mother's Day-y.

  Samantha Hunt

  Pain, Kids, Motherhood

  Source: therumpus.net

• Much of the writing I do about the female body is to remind women, myself included, that they make life and they make death. That strikes me as a far more powerful stance than the weak lies told about mothering.

  Samantha Hunt

  Powerful, Lying, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• I like the night. I like a slight terror to remind me how precious life is. Like I was sleeping with my smallest child and there were crazy coyotes howling outside. I knew how lucky I was to have her near me.

  Samantha Hunt

  Children, Crazy, Sleep

  Source: therumpus.net

• One book that has meant much to my writing is W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. He uses a photograph of Vladimir Nabokov hunting butterflies in a similar way. The image or a reference to the image is traced throughout the four separate narratives. It sometimes seems to be the only link between the pieces, while the symbol Nabokov cuts remains wide open, a pencil sketch, a mystery to interpret outside his role as emigrant/observer.

  Samantha Hunt

  Book, Writing, Butterfly

  Source: therumpus.net

• One night as I girl I spied my grandma and one of her sisters outside, holding hands and singing, "Sprites of the night are we, are we. Singing and dancing joyfully." It was witchy and wonderful because it meant there was power in joy. They were not afraid of the night because they were giggling. I am very interested in finding the surprising boundaries, for instance, where do joy and fear meet?

  Samantha Hunt

  Girl, Grandma, Night

  Source: therumpus.net

• Film maker Andi Olsen has a wonderful short film called Where the Smiling Ends. She waited at the Trevi Fountain in Rome and filmed the tourists only at the moment after their photos had been snapped, the moment their smiles dissolved. It's genius and heartbreaking. I think about her film when I explore the places the strips malls meet the wild world they are eating up.

  Samantha Hunt

  Thinking, Heartbreaking, Genius

  Source: therumpus.net

• In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

  Samantha Hunt

  Writing, Silence, Silent

  Source: therumpus.net

• I live with deer and coyotes. Lyme ticks are a daily concern and mystery, but, yes, what do they mean? I don't know yet. But I'd rather point out the abundance of mystery than pretend to solve it. As if I could solve it! What does a deer mean? Who knows? Everything!

  Samantha Hunt

  Mean, Mystery, Abundance

  Source: therumpus.net

• I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

  Samantha Hunt

  Mother, Children, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• The Dark Dark is a far slower project, clearly, and that's a relief. I look for slowness anywhere I can find it.

  Samantha Hunt

  Dark

  Source: therumpus.net

• My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

  Samantha Hunt

  Father, Broken, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

• I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

  Samantha Hunt

  Hopeful, Terrible, Novel

  Source: therumpus.net

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