“I particularly like to sniff out the strangeness in words. Sometimes words seem to possess a whole kingdom of otherness; much of the time, a particularly unexpected relationship between words will create this effect.

“When I began writing, I often referred to a 1964 Concise Oxford dictionary I happened on at a flea market. It was a kind of magic book for me, published the year of my birth, and it contained an extraordinary number of weird archaic words and lingering Gallicisms. My writing thus far has centered on the experience of being a foreigner for whom language is both innate and borrowed, both of the self and the other; the words and cadences of my writing reflect this, or attempt to.”

Registers in the mother tongue
“The creative process is inherently instinctive. I see Instinct as a Great Lady leading the pageant with a Preux Chevalier named Mind who attends to her every step. When I came to Paris as a graduate student, I kept a razor-sharp focus on the French language. Earning my degree required I master French at a native level. I recall courses where we’d spend a month analysing two pages of a novel, scrutinising the words and syntax through the magnifying glass of a French literary sensibility. While this pace frustrated me, it taught me to pay attention to words. I began shifting this attention onto English and heard registers in my mother tongue previously hidden to me. I became privy to the range of foreignness the English language can accommodate, to how at ease it is in allowing in ‘strangers’. Around this time I began writing my first book, (The Lost and Found and Other Stories) diving for oddities in the Oxford Concise and stringing words together as much for their sound and resonance as for their meaning. Writing with acute attention to sound association resembles composing and adds yet another level of meaning. Something more is signified by the text’s music, and this added value is feeling, a sensibility unique to the literary creation.”

Writing with the body
“I am, essentially, a ‘jouisseuse’ when I write. I’m out for pleasure. Despite how difficult writing can be, or maybe because of it, I try to remain attentive to what pleases me. Pleasure is as much a thing of the body as of the mind; it happens at the confluence of both, at their meeting point. We have a long philosophical tradition of elevating the fruits of the mind while denigrating the body; this particular equation has had the habit of aligning women with the maligned body.

“For a whole range of reasons – cultural, historical, biological, philosophical – women are perhaps well placed to write about their bodies or, as the French feminist Helene Cixous claimed, to write with their bodies. What we are touching upon here is the feminine erotic, which encompasses not only the sensuality of the body and imagination but more globally, a woman’s essential aliveness, her creative élan, the symphony of her emotions, her joie de vivre, her desires and spiritual connections. Poet Audre Lordes wrote, “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” In this sense, women’s experience of the erotic is a far cry from the reductively sexualized definition patriarchy has long affixed to it. In Lordes’ view, a woman’s erotic turn-on has political stakes; it is what frees her from the forces of oppression.

“Writing, of course, is a huge turn-on to any woman who writes, otherwise she wouldn’t bother! I wonder why literature, of all the arts, is often seen as pure mind-sport; the collective image of the writer has her seated at a desk in front of a screen, lost in thought. Essentially she is a head person. But what effect do the words have on the body? And how does she write with her body, as Cixous suggested?

“I’ve started a salon in Paris, Madame du Châtelet Productions, to explore these questions and am encouraging women writers to read/perform in their turn on, engaging their bodies in the text in whatever ways they find pleasurable. I propose a reframing of the text-body encounter, to see, as with the union of Cupid and Psyche, if it gives birth to Pleasure. The salon pays homage to Emilie du Chatelet, an 18^th Century mathematician, libre penseuse, and coquette extraordinaire, who outwitted her lover Voltaire in science and math experiments, gambled men under the table through her remarkable stunts with numbers, translated Newton into French while pregnant and created the fashion of rouging nipples for the plunging necklines she favored. In her famous Traité du Bonheur she wrote, ‘We must try to invite pleasure in through all the doors to our soul: we have no other business but this.’ Extraordinaire, non?”

Full interview: https://piecedwork.com/2015/01/21/anne-marsella/