Cultivating Patience w. MARY RUEFLE

Author photo by Hannah Ensor.

Cultivating Patience w. MARY RUEFLE

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Discussed In This Episode

Letting go of expectations. Falling in love with solitude. Being part of a larger whole. Time. “Oh, somebody else is lonely too.” Repeating epiphanies. Domesticity. Letting the work in. “It breaks my heart that so many people don't understand that their life is their own.” Boredom. Mental cruising. We’re all dead.

Bonus Segment: A Love Letter to Letters

Mary talks about why letters are her favorite literary form.

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