OVERWRITTEN questionnaire

When in your life have you wanted to write, but couldn’t? When have you had to stop writing? How did this affect your sense of being a writer? How may it have changed your writing?

In what ways is writing separate from your other practices, and in what ways is it integrated? Do you intend writing to be separate from other things you do? If so, why? Would you like to integrate them better? If so, how might you accomplish this?

Describe a project you have abandoned, whether a writing project or something else, that you would like to return to. Why would you like to return to it? What problems do you foresee in returning to it and attempting to revisit, revise, or complete it?

In what ways is duration an active quality in your work? How does the passing of time (or the fact of time having passed) contribute to what you produce as a writer/artist?

Given the fact that under misogynist racial capitalism we all live with intermittent crises to varying degrees and in different ways (whether racial discrimination, gendered violence, the exploitation of our labor, sickness, poverty, displacement, a lack of resources, etc.), how have such crises shaped your processes as a writer/artist? With the manifestation of a work, do these crises remain present in the work? If so, how?

In the absence of such crises, how might you hope to write or make work differently?

In what ways has “failure” facilitated the making of your work? Describe a work you have made that has been a “success” insofar as it has manifested from, or managed to address, its beginnings in failure?

In what ways does “not writing” (non-productivity) constitute a rhythm/rhythms for your work (productivity)?

Have you ever stopped writing/making for an ethical and/or political reason? If so, describe. What, if anything, were the consequences of stopping? In what ways may this “stopping” have produced something of value, albeit inadvertently?

Are there certain subjects or is there certain content that you feel your work can only address negatively, through their exclusion; which is to say, by not writing about them, or by only addressing them through restraint? If so, describe.

Are there ways you feel like you cannot write? Are there genres that you feel you cannot write in, because you are barred from writing in them, or because you feel that they do not serve you or others like you? If so, describe.

What genres most serve you and others like you? What genres do you feel you need to invent, because they may be able to serve yourself and others like you? What, if any, genres should be abandoned, avoided, or abolished?