Alex Marzano-Lesnevich discusses the first pages of their essay “Futurity” which appeared in the 2022 Best American Essays. We talk about their splintered approach to the essay during a splintered time, how they bypassed the usual expectations of structure and made their process physical (hint: it involved little pieces of paper) with the help of Jane Allison’s beloved craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, and issues of audience and representation.
Marzano-Lesnevich’s full essay can be found here.
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Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. It has been translated into eleven languages. Their next book, Both and Neither, is forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally. An excerpt, "Body Language," appears in Best American Essays 2020. A 2023 United States Artist fellow, they are the Rogers Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Passages: Alex Marzano-Lesnevich on the essay “Futurity”