why write: Gary Indiana — clarifying questions, scrambling for survival

why write and thoughts on writing? Gary Indiana

photo: Hedi El Kholti https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/gary-indiana-tells-painter-sam-mckinniss-about-his-vile-days

I didn’t know what I was writing or why I was writing it until I’d worked on it for a couple of years; it was a fumbling process of clarifying certain questions I’d always had in my brain, and maybe answering a few, first of all…

I didn’t expect to write about my friendship with…

Writing about it freed me from certain myths I’d spun around that friendship for years.

….scrambling for survival the whole time by writing journalism.

…Writing is as much about withholding as it is about telling.

…I wanted to refine it, and focus on things that meant something, or could mean something by writing about them.

…I don’t identify with the image of the writer or the artist as a person tortured by an urgent need to express something. It’s actually quite arbitrary whether you express something or not.

source: an interview

Interview with Gary Indiana