Episode 18: Dara Wier—Chance, Risk, and “Getting Away With It”

Risk taking, risk evaluation, risk avoidance are all leaned up against when one decides to become a writer and decides how to write what one writes. We hear writers say to one another all the time: how did you get away with that?! Or, I can’t believe you got away with that! We admire how writers “get away” with things in writing. Why is this? What attracts us to this? Obviously, at least partly, because in that expression is implicitly also unsaid: Hmmmmm, I don’t know if I could have let myself do that. Courage, recklessness, intention, all big things writers concern themselves with on a word-by-word basis. We will also expand our conversation into areas that involve Chance, Chance Operations, Generative Procedures, Erasure, Treated Texts, Ouilipian and other contingent constraints and why these are experiencing a renewed popularity. We will also talk about issues of agency and accountability.