Politics & Power Quote by Terri Windling

There is a quiet, practical melancholy in that “primarily.” Terri Windling isn’t boasting about a library; she’s sketching the shape of a life spent in transit, where even your most intimate possessions become evidence in a geographic argument. A book collection is supposed to be portable in spirit but stubbornly physical in fact: boxes, shelves, weight, dust, the slow accumulation of marginalia. By locating it “primarily in America,” Windling implies a split self, or at least a split archive. The mind can range; the books stay put.

The line also reads like a gentle correction to romanticized ideas of the artist as untethered. People move for love, work, visas, health, politics, weather. The books don’t glide across borders with them. They anchor. They also testify: “that’s where I’ve lived most of my life” is less a biography than a quiet credential. My reading happened there. My reference points formed there. My intellectual scaffolding is stacked in that place.

Because Windling is an artist, the collection isn’t just utilitarian. It’s a studio tool and a memory palace: folklore sources, art books, novels that fed an aesthetic. Saying it’s “in America” hints at the friction between creative identity and location, between where you are now and where your influences are stored. It’s a small sentence that smuggles in a big truth: home is not always where you sleep; sometimes it’s where your books are waiting.