Explore popular quotes and sayings by a novelist Joyelle McSweeney.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Toxicon & Arachne (2021) from Nightboat Books, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) from University of Michigan Press, Salamandrine: 8 gothics (2013) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade (2012), Flet (2007), The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), and The Red Bird (2001), the latter four published by Fence Books. Her translations of Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020) were published alongside Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, and Sawako Nakayasu by Wave Books. Her reviews appear at The Constant Critic and elsewhere, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry magazine, Octopus Magazine,GultCult, and Tarpaulin Sky, among many other places. Along with her husband Johannes Göransson, she is the founder of Action Books which has published a number of contemporary authors including Lara Glenum, Tao Lin, Arielle Greenberg, and Hiromi Itō. She recently added to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing by &NOW Books, which released in May 2013. She graduated from Harvard College as well as MPhil, Oxford University; MFA University of Iowa Writers Workshop
The Internet is a graveyard, a bright malfunctioning littoral, and it is entirely necropastoral. But the necropastoral can't be sustained - it's non-sustainable.
The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'.
I've begun to recognize myself as a Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores!
You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.
My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.