Constantly Questioning with Tanaïs

At the Creative Independent, Tanaïs discusses their expansive memoir, In Sensorium: Notes for My People, in which they examine alternate histories and universes of memories and scent. “I think that community building is really important and I think it’s also equally as important to distinguish your own voice and your own mind from that community,” they say. “I think there’s a lot of emphasis placed on literary citizenship, which is in the most simple definition, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ You give and you take and you offer help and you pick other people up; you’re just in an ecosystem. This book is questioning what it even means to be a citizen or to belong to anything. I belong to many things and I feel like what I started to become very aware of is how other minds and other writers’ opinions, and the way that I would feel my energy was being drawn from me was actually affecting my own work.”