Roundtable on Desire
Genevieve Hudson, Chelsea Bieker, T Kira Madden, and Kimberly King Parsons discuss desire and how it manifests in their writing and in their lives. The following conversation was conducted online over the course of several weeks.
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Genevieve Hudson: I’ve been thinking a lot about desire this year and what it means to want something. Nietzche talks about how it’s the desire and not the desired that we love in the end. That’s a compelling idea: that desire is transferred between objects, that the object of my desire can change but the wanting can remain the same. Because it’s the wanting, not the having, that feels so blinding and sweet. Desire is the promise of possibility.
What about you all? What does desire bring up for you?
Chelsea Bieker: When I consider the word desire, immediately the word “choice” comes to mind along with it. With each desire, I am propelled to make a choice of action I might take either toward or against it. Often I think of desire in terms of sex or love or longing as something that lives within me and I can savor it without taking an action. I have come to know that the savoring of desire as a solo rumination is very satisfying. I know that not each ping of desire must be met with a reveal to another person or an action. I can hold it and enjoy it and look at it. Then I think it funnels into my art in a way that can feel wild and untamed yet still safe to the life I have built.
But of course desire can be for any number of things. The first way I consider desire though seems to be related to romantic love or sex. But in day to day life I think desire most often takes up residence in different realms for me--desire for family, desire for career success or desire for self improvement. Desire for beautiful objects. Beautiful places. There’s all kinds of desire. I desire stories and books in the way someone might desire a particularly rich dessert, might desire safety or escape.
T Kira Madden: Desire lives in my body in the same places shame lives. Maybe it’s because I’m gay, maybe it’s because I’m Asian, maybe it’s because I’m Jewish or because I am the product of an extramarital affair or because the people I’ve desired most have historically been the same people to violate and harm me. It’s probably all of the above. But I do think I am an artist and a deeply feeling and deeply suffering person because of how desire and shame collide within me at all times. I always like to say I write nonfiction with and because of my grief, fiction with and because of desire. That’s still true for me. In my stories desire can be fractal and alive and examined at angles outside my own; sometimes, even, that desire is the engine of joy.
GH: Kira, I love how you describe desire and shame colliding within you. I experience that, too, that binary nature of the two, that crash and collision of wanting something and then the sting and embarrassment of the wanting. I’ve always thought it had to do with my queerness and coming to understand my sexuality at the same time I was being brought up as a Catholic in the Deep South. What I wanted was never good with a capital G. What I wanted was taboo, and it was the taboos that stirred my desire. Where I’m from, the Church wields shame as a way to discipline people out of their desires. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully escape the shame of that origin story, which is something I’ve learned to be okay with.
Kimberly King Parsons: I like what Chelsea is saying about choice—there’s always the choice to act or not to act, but I feel I have very little control over WHAT I desire. I’m lit up with want all the time, for all kinds of things that may or may not be good for me. I think desire itself becomes a kind of drug, just lying there at night flexing your hands because you want something so bad.
For my writing, desire maybe translates two ways: to ambition, which in my family was always taken as a very positive thing (it’s only recently that I’ve seen certain people throw it around like an insult—the last time was a mom friend of mine expressing shock that I was going on a trip without my kids to write. “I didn’t realize you were so ambitious,” she said pointedly). I don’t feel bad wanting good things for my work. It’s taken me a while, but now I’m past the impulse to claim any success is accidental, like, Oh gosh, it has nothing to do with the 12 years I spent writing this book and working hard in this field, wow I must just be lucky! But for me desire also plays at the sentence level. Hopefully the reader is charmed, seduced by the language I’m using, what I’m saying and refusing to say. It’s intimate. My favorite writers burn me up like that. And it’s the best kind of desire because it’s on the page--you can’t touch it. It’s forever unconsummated. Perfectly on fire.
GH: Kim, I connect so much with what you are saying about the best kind of desire being the kind that’s unconsummated and therefore perfectly on fire. That’s what I was getting at when I was talking about how it’s the desire and not the desired that actually captivates us. Our desire is at its most powerful or most on fire, as you say, before we quench it. Once we get it, the desire, that fire, diminishes. The power is in the wanting, not the having. That makes me think about a poem I heard read by the poet Mark Leidner. I can’t remember the line, but the sentiment is this: getting what you want is like walking up to a neon sign, placing your hand on it, and realizing it is not hot. Meaning, I guess, that the heat of the thing lies in your projection of it and not in what it really is.
My next question is about the body. Desire, I think, can be as physical as it is emotional. When you think about desire, where do you feel it in your body?
CB: I love considering where things live in the body. For me desire feels related to the stomach, a clenching and a forgetfulness to breath properly. I have to really think about breath almost technically at times, to make sure I’m not taking small tense sips of air. I have to release my clutch on desire at times in order to breathe.
But in other ways desire, like desire for rest, or desire for art, feels more desperate. In the throat perhaps.
GH: For me, desire can be a lightness in my chest, a hot knot under my tongue, the swirl of a spoon through my stomach.
KKP: Like Gen’s hot knot, desire mostly lives in my mouth. But like Chelsea, there’s also a clenching for me too, something like making a fist around a sharp little seed in your palm.
TKM: Mine aligns with anxiety signals. Vision tightening. Prickly scalp. A need to sit on my hands and feel the weight and pressure of that. And is it too obvious to mention the between-the-legs pulse? That.
GH: Have any of you read Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Marie Brown? It’s about the politics of feeling good and how that relates to social justice. Brown explores how we can make social justice “the most pleasurable human experience” and not only see it as a duty or a form of work. The way Brown talks about desire is very connected to happiness and healing. Have you ever considered following your desires as a way to heal?
CB: I think about this often, and to me it feels tied to being kind to myself. Allowing myself to have desires and following them as a way of healing feels really kind. I can be so critical and hard on myself. I think desire is such a broad term, though. Here I’m thinking of it as it pertains to my desire for health, for wellness for my children and myself, for places that feel good to me, for a career that feels fair in terms of treatment and pay. I think those are all necessary and kind ways to follow a desire.
But desire can also take us off track, become a distraction. If I’m desiring something that I know will ultimately harm me then following that does not feel useful. It’s actually a kindness to myself to say no to some desires. To acknowledge them and hold space for them and look at them, but not act. I think that’s part of self care too.
To submit to every desire as if we have no control limits our power and agency, actually feels like a recipe for misery. I find great joy in eliminating things--for instance, I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in over 11 years, haven’t had caffeine in 2 years, and now haven’t had processed sugars since December, so maybe my desire lies in saying no to desire in order to reach toward my ultimate desire of a body that works and functions the best it can so I can get as much writing done as I can. The fun of indulging reckless desires in this stage of life feels like a really big energy suck. I can put those curiosities on the page instead. I have a great imagination.
KKP: I haven’t read Pleasure Activism but I love Brown’s idea of not settling for less than the life you want. It makes me think of something Jack Gilbert said in an interview with The Paris Review: “It’s almost unfair to have been as happy as I’ve been. I didn’t earn it; I had a lot of luck. But I was also very, very stubborn. I was determined to get what I wanted as a life.” Setting basic privilege aside for a second, I think that’s an incredibly empowering stance to take. I know that I’ve made certain choices to ensure I’m able to continue writing. I need structure and accountability and a partner who understands what I’m trying to do with my life. I need children to depend on me and to motivate me financially. I work best with obstructions and limitations--too much free time is poison for me. From the outside, some of that might seem antithetical to art-making, but without obligations I become a complete fuckup. Every decision I’ve made has ultimately been made in service of the writing life.
As far as the healing part goes, like Brown, I think the root of every desire is good or at least neutral--I don’t believe there’s anything inherently bad about wanting something, even if it’s the wrong thing. It gets sticky when we talk about acting on those desires, like Chelsea said. I guess I’m largely thinking about sexual desire here, and the idea that nothing is out of bounds in the fantasy realm. I feel like I’m really fortunate to be coming from a place where no major harm has been done to me in this way, where there’s nothing I need to heal from (which I realize is totally unusual for a woman living in our society). Sexual desire is an engine that drives so much of my experience of the world, not in the sense that I’m acting on those impulses, but that I’m feeling them deeply and letting myself be led around by them. For me sex is tangled up with art is tangled up with food is tangled up with music is tangled up with intimacy. It sounds simplistic, but there are so many pleasures in this world I feel so, so lucky to get to enjoy. I want to indulge but never overindulge, because I want to keep (periodically!) indulging. I want to deprive myself of things so they’re that much sweeter when I give in to them (and here I’m literally thinking about how I limit sugar for weeks like Chelsea but then I eat a donut and have a religious experience).
I was thinking about David Berman’s suicide, and a line from a song on his last record: “The end of all wanting/is all I’ve been wanting.” It made me think how much desire, in both its simple and complicated forms, keeps me moving and curious and thrilled to be alive. Obviously depression is about more than desire or a lack thereof, but Berman’s line just made me think of how tremendously sad that would be, to want the wanting to stop. When the promise of those things that once brought pleasure is dulled forever by the wrong mix of chemicals in the brain, or by some trauma or deep grief.
GH: What about in terms of writing? Are there desires that reoccur for your characters, things they want, obsessions they return to, a burning they can’t seem to shake?
CB: Most of my characters in one way or another are desiring a maternal love. My novel is mainly about this and the forms that desire can take. It’s a desire I know best mainly because I’ve been searching for it myself my whole life and have come up short. So it remains within me, never really satisfied. My characters know a thing or two about that. Unquenched desire in this realm can feel like wild sadness with no bounds. It can also instigate a lot of action to thwart it, often reckless.
TKM: I recently half-joked to a new friend that all I write about are “theme parks and threesomes.” My characters are always desiring authenticity in places that feel anything but. I love facades. Masks. Performances. The desire to nudge the curtain open, just a peek, to be let in on something true. Regarding threesomes: yes, often there are literal threesomes (everyone wants to fuck each other in my work), but I’m most interested in the dynamics of desire in threes. A chair with a missing leg. Where and how does it balance? I like characters to have shifting allegiances, the desire to turn on someone at any moment. The desire of the person left behind.
KKP: Most of my characters are motivated by sensual desires--not necessarily sexual, but desires of the body: to touch and be touched, to taste, to hear specific words coming from specific mouths. Many of my characters feel trapped in their lives, and they’re trying to find the person or the drug or the song or the sexual experience that will set them free. What about you, Gen?
GH: Someone pointed out recently that the characters in my story collection are longing for someone that is not physically with them anymore or someone that, for whatever reason, they cannot have. The desire for the lost person manifests in such a way that the desired person feels present, a part of the story even if they are not really there. The characters I write about are queer and in most of the stories their queer desire alienates them from the place where they live or the person they want. I’m curious about what happens when we feel like we have to bury a desire or when we continue to desire something after its left us. Does the desire itself keep the person with you? Does the desire for the person act as a stand in for the actual love?
One of my good friends has a tattoo on her arm of two cupped hands holding a flame. She says it means, “hold your desire lightly.” I love that idea. The characters in my stories do not hold desire lightly, and as a result, many of them get burned, feel the scalding in their tightened grip.
CB: This makes me think of one of my favorite lines by Amy Hempel--it’s actually the entirety of a micro fiction she wrote: “Just once in my life – oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” This feels connected to a pull of desire to me, sort of looping around the same things I desire over and over, peeling back new layers. I’ve also been thinking about how writing for me, the act of it, is the ultimate expression of my desire. I’ve often wondered how I would manage life at all without writing, and I don’t think I could, which is why I write--but the act of it feels so cathartic at times, and the ability to paint desire on the page is so satisfying to me almost on a spiritual level. Sometimes, and not often, but it does happen, when I write, I feel that I’m in a much different space in my mind, one that feels hypnotic and different desires are pouring out. I also feel that I can quell some of my desire by writing about it which feels like such a freedom, and yet remains very individual and private in some sense. It has somewhere, energetically to go. I can then send it off into the world but by then it has become its own thing, apart from me.
TKM: That all really resonates with me, Chelsea, Hempel line and all (I open every class with that line!) I think the most basic and common writing advice around is “Make your character want something, even if it’s a glass of water,” and though I am so goddamn bored by these fast and easy “tricks,” there really is something to that. What is a story, a narrative, a person without want? Sometimes I admittedly get caught up in the metaphorical: character wants compassion, she wants sublimity, she wants to experience the hot sting of revenge. But there’s something beautifully classic and true about wanting that glass of water. Gogol’s Major Kovalyov just wanted his nose back. Calvino’s Cosimo wants to be in the trees. Sometimes it’s the simple wants that propel me most, both in writing and in my lived experience. Get up. Get that glass of water. Maybe today you’ll finally visit your old friend Suzanne, because you’ve been wanting her company and gunpowder tea. That’s how it goes.
GH: If you were to each recommend a book or poem about desire what would it be? I can’t stop at just one so I’ll say Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and the poem The Lovers by Dorianne Laux.
TKM: All of your books! I’d add Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips. House Rules by Heather Lewis. City of Boys by Beth Nugent. Garth Greenwell’s forthcoming Cleanness, and Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming Real Life. As for poems, I always go back to Frank O’Hara; all O’Hara, really, but I keep Noir Cadadou, or the Fatal Music of War in my pocket: “That is why I want you, must have you. Draw the black line where you want it, like a musical string it will be love and lovely and level as the horizon from our exotic and dancing deck.” I mean! What more could we need.
KKP: Oh my god, that’s so beautiful, T Kira. And I also think each of your books are like case studies in delicious desire. I’ll add Carole Maso’s Aureole, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Heather Lewis’s Notice, Leah Dieterich’s Vanishing Twins, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.
CB: White Oleander is one of the most beautiful and true books about desire I’ve ever had the fortune of reading. Astrid’s desire for her mother feels palpable and terribly beautiful, desperate and painful and evolving. Her mother Ingrid’s desire for art and a deeply sensual existence thwart the confines of motherhood and bleed a reckless desire for unrequited love that pulls them apart. The desire from character to character in this book is so stunning. Also Brokeback Mountain, the short story by Annie Proulx. The love there, the purity of it, and the anguish. It’s one of the best short stories I will ever read.
Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney's, Tin House(online), Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, and the author of two forthcoming books, the novel GODSHOT (Catapult, April 7th, 2020) and the story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS (2021). Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. She lives with her husband and two children and teaches college composition as well as fiction writing for Catapult and the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. See her website here.
T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Sun, and Guernica. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is available now.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light (Vintage, 2019) and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf. A recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD. Her website is here.
