Mariah Rigg
Photo courtesy of Mariah Rigg
Bio
BIO
Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, the Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Catapult, and elsewhere, and has received support from MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Rigg’s prose chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle, was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press in 2023. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
For years I’ve orbited around Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick’s theory of paranoid and reparative reading and what it means for those of us who write. In paraphrased (and far less precise) words, Sedgwick’s theory borrows from psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to establish two positions of reading: the paranoid, which is largely reflexive and characterized through anxiety, envy, and hatred; and the reparative, which, through hope, assembles the fragments of our horrific world into a new whole, opening a path to (queer) possibilities founded on love.
In a world like ours, where innocents are murdered every day, it is so very easy to give into hatred. I do not know if it is possible to stay soft, to stay open in times like ours. What I do know, or what I hope, is that there are ways to work and write towards the possibility of a better future. This is what I strive for in my life and in my writing.
To be awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is unbelievable. It’s life-changing. It is a chance to write, to dream, but more than that, to slow down. To reevaluate where I am, and what my work is doing (and could do) for my community. I often think that is narcissistic, at best naive, to think words on a page could ever change anything. And yet here I am. Here we are. Time to sit down and write.