Rebecca Solnit
In Washington, DC, last month my event was hosted in an ex-synagogue. Picture of a detail of the place, picture of the post-its pile left over from signing books (I love these name collages that result, and yeah, there are these moments of contact with strangers in the process of signing.) I felt like offering something other than caustic commentary on all the ugliness today.
Last night I heard poet Ada Limon speak of how after ending her tenure as poet laureate of the USA she "got back to my strangeness," a wonderful and inviting turn of phrase (and yeah only tangentially or poetically relevant to the text in the first image, or not because maybe remembering your own strangeness lets you welcome the stranger; denying it leads to that attempt to create airtight categories and praise social homogeneity).
