I write to keep my eyes open

Writing is my way of being quiet—being quiet and looking around, here on earth, where things in fact (as not in our cheapened attentions) are extraordinarily strange. I take to heart the little caveat in Chekhov’s journal: “She had too little skin to cover her face. In order to open her eyes she had to shut her mouth, and vice versa.”

I write to keep my eyes open.

MH Interviews are all about words, of course, but I’d be interested to know how you feel about silence—in the world and in your work.

HM I’ve always wanted to do one of those monastic retreats where nobody talks at all for a month. I’m a recluse by nature. In person among persons, I burn too fast: for excess of

misanthropy or terror I find myself overcompensating. Seems I’m full of unseemly desires to please, self-defeating flurries of words. (Frost said talk was a hydrant in the yard, and poems were a faucet in an upstairs room. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.)

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2749/heather-mchugh