Latest Laura Mullen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step.

  Laura Mullen

  Cancer, Thinking, Epidemics

  Source: therumpus.net

• Admitting how ill we are, how deep the damage goes, how constantly the abuse cycle is repeated and how horribly we have failed those who most deserve our care and protection.

  Laura Mullen

  Abuse, Admitting, Care

  Source: therumpus.net

• I hope, by being honest about what happened to me, to help nourish a culture of honesty that might make something different - and better - possible. We really need to squarely face the issue of child abuse in America, and to look at our perversity, our illness.

  Laura Mullen

  Children, Honesty, America

  Source: therumpus.net

• What was toughest for me in writing "Trust," was reliving it, turning and facing this. We move on and we don't move on, you know? She's still there - and by "she" I mean me - caught in that windowless room, that bad bargain and that violation. No one can touch me, sexually, without activating that memory. But I had walled, I thought, that time off. I say that and then want to say "and I got off lightly"!

  Laura Mullen

  Memories, Moving, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country

  Laura Mullen

  Daughter, Mother, Country

  Source: therumpus.net

• Wherever something is "pinned down" there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.

  Laura Mullen

  Littles, Holes

  Source: therumpus.net

• In a museum in El Paso, Texas, there's a map that shows all the places the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been (because it shifted) - I find it very clarifying (not confusing) to be reminded that everything we feel like we've really pinned down is transient, arbitrary, and marks the site of a painful if not violent negotiation, one that may not have ended.

  Laura Mullen

  Museums, Texas, Confusing

  Source: therumpus.net

• Is it possible that where the subject is socially approved (tah tah tah TAH tah, it's war) almost no one thinks we're "stuck," but when we think too much about what no one else wants to think about, as well as when we think without the thoughts evolving, then we're seen as trouble (and / or troubled)?

  Laura Mullen

  War, Thinking, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

• One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Effort, Desire

  Source: therumpus.net

• Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)

  Laura Mullen

  Stars, War, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

• In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

  Laura Mullen

  Book, Desire, Batteries

  Source: therumpus.net

• The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.

  Laura Mullen

  Dallas, Groups, Events

  Source: therumpus.net

• So when we're told to "move on" or "let go," we should take a look at who is saying it and why, and when we see repetition happening it's worth trying to understand it before attempting to shut it down.

  Laura Mullen

  Letting Go, Moving, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

• Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Interesting, Missing

  Source: therumpus.net

• It's painful, but it's part of the recognition that makes real healing possible, if healing is possible (the jury is out on that, that's the usual phrase - should I say the jury is deadlocked?). Staying with the pain, attending to it, being present to and with it - that's the task, because that's the only (as far as I can tell) hope of finding a way forward.

  Laura Mullen

  Pain, Real, Healing

  Source: therumpus.net

• It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?

  Laura Mullen

  Philosophy, Dwelling, Meditation

  Source: therumpus.net

• We live in a culture that insists on "moving on" (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's "Miss Havisham" with some (self) recognition if not relief.

  Laura Mullen

  Loyalty, Moving, Self

  Source: therumpus.net

• Miss Havisham is an important feminine literary figure in the tradition of Antigone (though it's significant that Antigone is fighting to bury something and Miss Havisham refuses, as it were, to bury the corpse). Like Hamlet, she's focused on what everyone would rather not know or would like to forget, and she seems crazy / stuck as well as bitter, but she's also a perfect prototype of a performance artist. She's intentionally hard to deal with inviting the audience to remain with the violated body, the evidence of violence.

  Laura Mullen

  Crazy, Fighting, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

• Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is coherent, trust that was the best writing advice I ever got (I got it from Carole Maso and I pass it on). It's true, and clearer and clearer as one grows and gains an improved sense of who one actually is (as versus who one was supposed to be).

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Writing, Advice

  Source: therumpus.net

• The most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own "complicated grief" in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.

  Laura Mullen

  Art, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• Helen Vendler calls this kind of interrogation of a work "roads not taken," suggesting that it's useful, when writing critically, to consider what differences it makes to the work or the encounter with the work if changes are made. It's one way of better understanding your experience, comparing it to other possible experiences you can imagine having.

  Laura Mullen

  Taken, Writing, Differences

  Source: therumpus.net

• With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Mean, Effort

  Source: therumpus.net

• It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Book, Fire

  Source: therumpus.net

• I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.

  Laura Mullen

  Art, Book, Confusing

  Source: therumpus.net