"But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on"
About this Quote
A provocation wrapped in a joke: write, or else. Katherine Dunn fires a flare against complacency, pitching writing not as a rare gift but as a civic act. The extremity of stomped on, both comic and menacing, matches her taste for the grotesque and the kinetic. The novelist of Geek Love and a keen observer of boxing, she knew how extremity can jolt people out of passivity. Her language throws a feint that lands as moral insistence.
Everybody should write asserts a radical democratization of authorship. Stories are not the property of institutions or the polished few; they belong to anyone living a life. Writing becomes a tool for wrestling meaning out of mess, for catching the fleeting moments that otherwise evaporate. It is also a stance against erasure. If you do not set it down, someone else will tell it for you, or it will vanish. The urgency is especially pointed for voices pushed to the margins, the kind Dunn persistently championed. Silence, whether imposed by fear, shame, or cultural gatekeeping, is the real antagonist.
The mock-threat of stomping functions like a coachs bark in a gym: brash, hyperbolic, designed to test resolve. Coming from a writer who chronicled fighters and reveled in the spectacle of bodies and performance, the verb is no accident. It satirizes the excuses that keep stories bottled up and exposes the cost of withholding: a thinner public imagination. Dunn is not glorifying harm; she is turning the volume up on responsibility. Her ethos prizes the raw, the imperfect, the freakish as sources of insight. Better a flawed draft than a perfected silence.
Under the laughter and the shove is faith. Faith that ordinary life carries extraordinary texture, that writing is a practice anyone can claim, and that each untold story diminishes the chorus. Dunn throws down the gauntlet: step into the ring and say it.
Everybody should write asserts a radical democratization of authorship. Stories are not the property of institutions or the polished few; they belong to anyone living a life. Writing becomes a tool for wrestling meaning out of mess, for catching the fleeting moments that otherwise evaporate. It is also a stance against erasure. If you do not set it down, someone else will tell it for you, or it will vanish. The urgency is especially pointed for voices pushed to the margins, the kind Dunn persistently championed. Silence, whether imposed by fear, shame, or cultural gatekeeping, is the real antagonist.
The mock-threat of stomping functions like a coachs bark in a gym: brash, hyperbolic, designed to test resolve. Coming from a writer who chronicled fighters and reveled in the spectacle of bodies and performance, the verb is no accident. It satirizes the excuses that keep stories bottled up and exposes the cost of withholding: a thinner public imagination. Dunn is not glorifying harm; she is turning the volume up on responsibility. Her ethos prizes the raw, the imperfect, the freakish as sources of insight. Better a flawed draft than a perfected silence.
Under the laughter and the shove is faith. Faith that ordinary life carries extraordinary texture, that writing is a practice anyone can claim, and that each untold story diminishes the chorus. Dunn throws down the gauntlet: step into the ring and say it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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