"It is embedded in how I live. Specifically, writing everything that I dream of, and everything that fails me, all of the emotional reality. Often, there are things I'm afraid to say, and then I put them in my writing, and they're said. Then I can say it! I can read it in the book, and people aren't that shocked by it. Often, what people are shocked by has nothing to do with what I'm afraid of."
"When I was a teenager, growing up in a world that wanted me to die or disappear, I had to project invulnerability in order to survive. There was no other way. That was just reality, you know? I needed that invulnerability. Once upon a time, The Stranger's Homosexual Agenda column described Sycamore as a "gender-fucking tower of pure pulsing purple fabulous," and I'd say that description stands,"
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore walks Capitol Hill daily and experienced the arrival of a project called Terry Dactyl during pandemic lockdown. She postponed immediate work on that project while finishing a 2023 memoir, Touching the Art, alongside a prolific body of novels, memoirs, and anthologies. Writing functions as a method of survival: a way to record dreams, failures, and feared statements so they can be spoken, read, and absorbed without literal harm. She explains that expressing what she fears—writing what she thinks she might die for—reveals that she does not die, enabling different ways of living. Growing up required projecting invulnerability to survive a hostile world.
Read at Portland Mercury
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]