Guernica Magazine

Miscellaneous Files: Olivia Laing

In the first installment of our multimedia interview series, Olivia Laing uses screenshots to explain how the secretarial parts of writing can be both pleasurable and productive. The post Miscellaneous Files: Olivia Laing appeared first on Guernica.
Olivia Laing author photo

Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses screenshots from writers’s digital devices to understand their practice.

When I asked Olivia Laing to send me screenshots as part of this interview, she told me she only started using her iPhone a few weeks before. She’d primarily relied on “old-school” methods like notebooks and travel itineraries for her nonfiction books, three thorough and moving meditations on place, art, and the weight of our inner lives. For To The River, she walked along the Ouse, a river that attracts those who have “lost faith” and the one in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. The Trip to Echo Spring involved a cross-country journey through America, on which she explored alcoholism through six writers who struggled to put down the bottle. In Lonely City, Laing used the work of four artists, including Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, to examine the loneliness that plagued her in New York and seemed to have laid its grip on society at large. In between, she played hours of Tetris at a time—a game she later realized was an exercise in “how to assemble objects in empty space.”

Laing’s methods changed when she, somewhat unintentionally, started writing a novel in the summer of 2017. It was a moment when our political reality became stranger than fiction, and one in which Laing found it no longer possible to stick to the stable point of view she’d employed before. Written in seven weeks—and incorporating tweets from that time—Crudo follows its protagonist, a character based on both experimental novelist Kathy Acker and Laing herself, as she tries to make sense of the relentless news cycle. Laing admits to finding comfort in the “secretarial” parts of the work, and she sent me screenshots of her obsessively organized research folders as well as the presidential tweets that anchor Crudo. I met up with her at the Standard hotel in the East Village, the neighborhood that housed the ’70s punk scene Acker emerged from and one whose own certitude, following brutal gentrification, has become fuzzy.

Mary Wang for Guernica

Olivia Laing notebooks

1. “Writing from lots of different pens in probably horrible handwriting”

Guernica: What do we see here?

This is a set of travel and archive notebooks. My first two nonfiction books are journeys that

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Guernica Magazine

Guernica Magazine19 min read
On Beauty and Violence
As a child, violence was a geography I could visualize: a slab of earth in the Minnesotan suburbs, with a rock garden and two pink azaleas, a geography from which I could flee. It spanned to the neighbor’s forked metal fence, whose sharp black tines
Guernica Magazine13 min read
The Jaws of Life
To begin again the story: Tawny had been unzipping Carson LaFell’s fly and preparing to fit her head between his stomach and the steering wheel when the big red fire engine came rising over the fogged curve of the earth. I saw it but couldn’t say any
Guernica Magazine10 min read
Black Wing Dragging Across the Sand
The next to be born was quite small, about the size of a sweet potato. The midwife said nothing to the mother at first but, upon leaving the room, warned her that the girl might not survive. No one seemed particularly concerned; after all, if she liv

Related Books & Audiobooks