Male Muses And Inner Dicks: A Conversation With Kate Christensen

From the interview by Maud Newton for The Awl:

If Robert Graves were still around, he'd say that's impossible: "Woman is not a poet: she is either muse or she is nothing." Don't worry, though! It's not that women—sorry, woman—can't write, just that when a woman writes "she is herself the Muse, a Goddess without an external power to guide or comfort her." Why do you think there's been so much resistance historically to the idea that a woman might be creatively inspired by love and lust and longing for a man?

This makes no sense to me at all. Women need men to get pregnant, among other important things. So why can’t we need men to fuel our work?

My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then, I’ve written for and about and to and because of men.

Writing with this “external power to guide and comfort me” has inspired me to write in first-person male voices—it’s inspired my sex scenes—and it’s caused me to work very, very hard, in a disciplined, sustained way, as if I were a man, as if I were entitled to seize all that time for something as dubious as novel-writing. My male muses are crucial to my work, inseparable from it. They’re the oil that lights the lamp.

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