May 7, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

Writing is… Like when you go to the beach at seven o’clock at night…  And you go with someone you know, or someone you used to know, or someone you wished you knew, or someone you thought you knew from a dream you dreamed one night while sleeping in a stuffy apartment in student housing, in Stillwater Oklahoma, where roaches climbed over the walls, in a town far far away from any beach, but while you were there, at this beach, this person you thought you knew so well turns into your mother, or your brother, or your child, or your doctor, or the third grade teacher who hated you for no reason, or the best friend you never thought you deserved.  In other words, when you write, you take everyone and everything that ever happened to you; you pull out a crazy assortment of your reminiscences, or your readings, or your flat-out lies, or things you over-heard, or things you never heard of at all, and you turn this that you know, and that which you don’t, into the big whole oily world.  That’s why there’s no such thing as an autobiographical beach.  Even when it’s Hemingway, even when he’s writing about the war, even when he’s writing about taking his son with him into the Paris cafes, even when he’s (ostensibly) writing down this very conversation word for word.  Because no one can write it all down, and so she selects, and she selects for a reason, and the reasons have to do with way more than that beach, that beach in San Francisco, near the zoo, near SF State, about which, she appears, to be, writing…

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March 2, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

My “writing” is not autobiographical. My “plays” are not autobiographical.  This passage you’re currently reading (if indeed, “you” are), is not autobiographical, and if I were to write a “true” autobiography, I doubt such a “thing” would be autobiographical either. Why not? After all, the “words” are written by a biographical person; the words feature human beings, thus justifiably leading to a mis/interpretation of “me,” or of other people I “know.”  In addition, the words are not written in strictly “scientific” or “just the facts” modalities; so, why not autobiography? Because, beyond the obvious distancing from “real” life that occurs just by virtue of the use of a language employed to “contain” or “convey” life (or to “comment” on the use/s of language/s itself, in, or, “as in” life), there is this bigfat stylization implicit in all language that implies an even greater distance from what that language might merely denote to what it can only connote. Therefore “I” is as much of an icon, or a cipher, or an “other,” or a symbol, or a shape of a signaling signifier, as are any of the other “people” in my, or anyone’s, “words,” or world/s.  And if I ever made any utterance to the contrary, then I (or the I who I was at that time) had not yet come to the realization that, in words, we “represent” something else, again, with every/thing we “do.” Either that, or I wasn’t as oily about weaseling my way “out.”  Word.

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January 7, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

In a 1976 interview with New York’s then-FM radio station WNEW, Patti Smith said, when asked whether or not the lyrics of her song “Redondo Beach” were autobiographical: “That song is based on an old poem of mine; it’s kind of like my version of ‘Endless Sleep’ — having nothing to do with anything but fantasy.” Smith’s attitude seems like the best one to take when talking about whether or not writing is “autobiographical”; not that every work isn’t at some level involved with that creator’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, perceptions, experiences, etc., but the art itself has to do with the craft, or the transformation of those “things” into a product that is then set forth, both within history and within a traditional (art) form. The worn-out, dumbed-down notion that “art” and “biography” are interchangeable can lead a lesser man to believe that, say, Woody Allen is actually the nebishy intellectual character who populates so many of his films.  Such a confusion can make even a regular artist person reticent to discuss anything in “life” that might be connected to work, above, beyond, or below the nuanced knowledges and technical juxtapositions of literally everything involved with creation itself. Is the idiocy of this weirdly stupid “auto-detailizing” phenomenon related to our current, annoying, twittering pop trend toward the fetishization of the banally personal, and, in the worst cases of the “famous,” to all of those not-solely American obsessions with the “lives of ” (or lies about, told by, etc.) “those” people, none of whom (or which) has anything to do with anybody’s art?! (Pause…)  The life is not the work, period, is my new(er) answer toward, the auto/bio/graph/i/cal: No matter how artful (or how boring!) someone’s life, or someone’s autobiography, is, no one with any smarts, or with any real substance, will be “reading” it, meaning/full/y, as art, in the future, when, as Heiner Muller put it, we’ll be lucky, with our oily-ass selves, to be “living” on Mars.

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