Interview with Alina Stefanescu

On masks, being an outsider, and dread: an interview with Alina Stefanescu
https://formercactus.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/interview-with-alina-stefanescu/

I feel a deep sympathy with Mohsin Hamid’s description of fiction as a vehicle “for denuding false myths of national purity.” In an interview published in Guernica, Mohsin said something that I printed and taped inside my writing notebook. It applies to my poetry, prose, and CNF. In Mohsin’s words:

“I needed to write this book because as a mongrelized person, I feel personally threatened when everybody around me is seeking purity and certainty. I wrote the book I needed. The same impulse has guided me in these twenty odd years of writing; the audience has always been secondary. So many of us become writers because we need for certain books to exist that no one else is writing; especially, those of us who have migrated or have been dislocated. If you need a book to exist badly enough, you’ll write it.”

This is the gauntlet.