Tessa grattan biography of rory

Why Writing with a Knife?

Tessa grattan biography of rory mcilroy

“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create…when I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart…My soul makes itself through the creative act.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

The first time I read Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, I was twenty-one.

It’s a book of essays and poetry about borderlands—physical borderlands between the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, sexual borderlands, linguistic borderlands, psychological and spiritual and creative borderlands. Anzaldúa explores in vivid, lush, bold words those places of liminality and intersection, and she does it to create and recreate a shifting identity for herself. 

Reading it was like peeling back my flesh and pulling out my insides to explore them.

It was exciting to follow someone as closely as I—a white queer and gend