Read "Love in Infant Monkeys" from Willow Springs 60
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Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona's MFA program. And though she didn't stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later—a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy.
In an interview with Eclectica Magazine, Millet described the condition with which her characters grapple as follows: "It seems to me that adult lives are not chiefly lives of discovery but of calcification and sedimentation: we become more rigid and we become more passive, buried in the sand that blows over us... And rarely, punctuating these long plateaus of sameness and non-learning, there are moments of rapture. In such moments we feel how near we are to touching truth, but how far away truth is, and how always and forever it will hover there beyond our reach... Many of my characters are caught up in moments of rapture and recognition, indeed such moments pop up like jack-in-the-boxes, because what else is worth the price of admission, finally? Myself, I live for those moments."
We met with Lydia Millet on a shady porch in Spokane last spring, where we discussed imagination, the unsaid, and "the tragedy and glory of our individual selves."