“For a while, writing was everything to me: my identity, my job, the meaning of my life, the site of my deepest anxieties. Whenever the writing wasn’t working, I went to a very dark place. When I get stuck writing, it isn’t usually because of a logistical problem in the plot or because I can’t find the right word; it usually comes from a broad, circling, existential fear of failure. But writing requires failure and experimentation, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in that process. I recently took up modern dance. I love it. It felt like being exposed to a whole new language, a whole new mode of self-expression. I’m also terrible at it, and likely always will be. I’m a naturally clumsy, graceless person, and I’d never taken so much as a childhood ballet class. Through the practice of another art form, where I felt freer to stumble, I remembered why I write in the first place. It isn’t to be published or win awards. It’s not even to create something meaningful or aesthetically beautiful, necessarily. I write in pursuit of the same joy I find flailing and falling in the dance studio.”
—Kim Fu, author of How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood Editions, 2016)
Photo credit: Inti St. Clair