"Better go with the limerick..."

28 June 2020: "There’s a pace and a rhythm between grief and humor. And one of the things I try to show in working-class families is that a lot of the joking and the humorous set-ups are a way to process what you can’t stand—you’ll make a joke of it. I find that a lot and I think it’s a problem in most of Southern writing, because you shift into that headset in which everything instead of being tragic is being funny. The problem is if you take it too far it’s more of a source of contempt and self-hatred—you’ve got to be careful. But it makes the whole difference. And I think that’s true of queers, and I think it’s true of everybody who lives on the edge . . . that slightly canted vision of how the world works: you could cry, you could shoot yourself in the head, or you could turn it into a really nasty limerick. Better to go with the limerick, you know? It’s a survival strategy. And it makes a better writing. Deeper." --Dorothy Allison

I read two really great interviews with Allison today, including the one quoted above and cited below.

Grué, Mélanie. “‘Great Writing Always Sings’: Dorothy Allison Speaks.” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, vol. 53, no. 2, 2016, pp. 131–145. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/soq.2016.0016.