Hilton Als: Our Collective Lack of Humanity

I listened to an interview with Hilton Als on the Talk Easy podcast from February 2023. Around the 38th minute, Sam Fragoso, the host of the podcast, asks Hilton Als about his writing rituals and reads and old quote by him, “I’m a guilty person. I just go around the world feeling guilty. But when I’m working on something I can feel the energy shift in a piece of writing where I’m not in control of it any more.” - a quote from a 2020 interview on Guernica.

He then asks Als what is he feeling guilty about when not writing, his reply resonated with me:

Our collective lack of humanity.
Our lack of care from one another.
Our lack of believe from one another as a species.
Loneliness, people trying to connect and not connecting.
Violence, anger, isolation. A whole world of feelings to feel guilty about and not being able to make it better.

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Links:
Talk Easy Podcast
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/talk-easy-with-sam-fragoso/the-makings-of-writer-hilton-als

Hilton Als: “It’s always so moving to see how art claims us out of a kind of loneliness.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-hilton-als/

A Form Without a Form: Hilton Als in Conversation with Mary Wang
https://www.macp.sva.edu/a-form-without-a-form

https://www.hiltonals.com
https://www.instagram.com/hilton.als/