THE BELIEVER: I’ve seen you referred to as an art historian, a landscape writer, and an art critic, if not more. How do you consider your own work and writer’s identity?
REBECCA SOLNIT: In Wanderlust, I wrote, “This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.” I have a very clear sense of what I am here to do and what its internal coherence is, but it doesn’t fit into the way that ideas and continuities are chopped up into fields or labeled. Sometimes I say I’m an essayist, because that’s an elegant, historically grounded—if sometimes trivialized—mode of literature, while nonfiction is just a term for the leftovers when fiction is considered to be paramount, and creative nonfiction is even more abject a term.
Stumbled on to this wonderful interview with Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers on The Believer.
I'm so glad I stumbled on this as I was actually trying to research the cost of the magazine and different McSweeny's publications: McSweeney's - $55 quarterly, The Believer ($90 for 10 issues), Wholphin their great CD-Rom $50 for 4 quarterly issues sold on a rolling basis
When compared to their new iPhone app which is $5.99 and includes a 6 month subscription to some of the feature in the publications in addition to their site. Smart stuff. Perhaps bigger publishers should study them a bit if they could take a break from their repeat of the circa 2000 rush to micropayments debates.
