Some advice from outside the white male literary canon
1. You don’t need to be “educated” to write.
I did not read the white literary canon. My mother dragged me out of the classroom the day we were supposed to read Huckleberry Finn. She said I didn’t need to read that word two-hundred times to know it was wrong — to know white people were wrong throughout history.
“There are other books,” she said.
I remember her face and the freedom in it as we drove away. Mom had run away from residential school when she was about the same age. The same bravery she showed when she ran away from the nuns and priests was the same…
The body that accepts itself, now and then
I tell my friends I won’t know I’m famous until my nudes have leaked. I’ve been saying this for years. If The Secret is real, this is my way of asking the universe to just release them already. I’m also safeguarding myself by warning my friends that my nudes could leak, because I’ve been with men who were vindictive like that. What the men probably don’t know, and what my friends probably do, is that I’m fine with those nudes. They’re good nudes.
I have no fresh nudes. Every picture I took of my body was from a time when…
Terese Mailhot
New York Times Bestselling author of HEART BERRIES: A MEMOIR. Work in Pacific Standard, Elle, Longreads, Guernica, LA Times, and elsewhere.
