Reading, Writing, Living, and Feeling:

an Interview With Olivia Dresher on the Literary Fragment

Abstract

This article presents a discussion of the literary fragment and introduces the work of Olivia Dresher, an American anthologist, musician, and diarist, who has adopted Twitter as support for her intimate writings as of 2009. This preamble works as background to the exclusive interview with the writer reproduced here, through which we learn about Dresher’s formative years, her thoughts about the fragment, and the implications of writing on social media. The article highlights the relationship between fragmentary writing and modernity, and addresses the challenges underlying the analysis of fragments, which includes the very flexibility of these texts (which may take on a variety of forms), as well as the question of autobiography, as these productions are often of a personal, intimate nature. Olivia Dresher’s writings and anthologies – A silence of words (2019), In pieces: an anthology of fragmentary writing (2006), and Darkness and light: private writing as art (2000) – as well as works by theorists and critics such as Gerald L. Bruns, Philip Beitchman, and Leonor Arfuch have provided support for this study and for the presentation of Olivia’s thoughts in the interview.