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Garrett Hongo gives an eloquent account of the personal essay as one means for a community to come to know itself, to reject both external and internal stereotyping, to hear “stories that are somehow forbidden and tagged as aberrational, as militant, as depraved.” For a writer, as you live in this kind of silence, in this kind of misery, not knowing quite what it is that the world is not giving you, .. . that your work cannot address as yet, you are at the beginning of a critique of culture and society. It is the moment when powerful personal alienation slips into critical thinking;—the origin of imagination. It is this initial step of intellection that enables the emergence of new, transformative, even revolutionary creativity. It occurs at the juncture between the production of art and the exercise of deep critical thought.
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