Rebecca Wolff Interviewed at the Creative Independent

Annie Bielski interviews poet, publisher, and Hudson politician Rebecca Wolff at the Creative Independent as part of the publication's ongoing series, "Engaging Politically." "I was remembering when I first started thinking that I needed to eventually run for office," Wolff begins. "The idea emerged back around the same time that I started Fence, which was 1998." Picking up there: 

About a year after that, there was this attack on Fence that had to do with the publication’s ideological stance, which is about publishing writing coming from lots of different perspectives and different ideological positions. That’s what we’ve always been doing, and we had made a big stink about why we were doing that and what our goals and intentions were, but we were attacked by this Marxist literary critic for basically being a tool of neoliberalism, because what we were essentially doing was denaturing writing that had actual ideological positionality and we were packaging it, according to this critic, and basically making it palatable for consumption.

That was a pretty heavy critique. My response to it at the time was basically like, “Okay, I can see why what you’re saying is a problem.” Although, actually I’m not even sure I really said that—I probably was more like, “fuck you.” But what I eventually formulated as my response to that was, “I see what you’re saying, however, unfortunately art doesn’t really make enough difference in the world for you to critique my small non-profit literary journal whose intention is to basically publish in a democratic way. And if it did make a big difference in the world, then I would take your critique and I would change what I’m thinking and doing.”

That was pretty much what I was thinking at the time. I was sort of like, if art had enough political efficacy, then I would think that what you’re saying makes sense. Where I went from there was, “What does have enough political efficacy? What actually does really change things?” And then I was like, “Oh, it’s people being involved with the government, essentially.” I can be pretty literal, and I’ve been musing on this lately as I’m observing the trajectory of what’s happened since that time and how art has kind of coagulated as this entirely separate world unto itself. I guess it created a goal somewhere in my mind that was like, at some point I will become literally involved in politics.

Read on at the Creative Independent.