Rayne Fisher-Quann
WRITER
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
My Twitter bio is “girl with no needs,” which is a joke, because really I might describe myself as the girl with the most needs ever. But I am also a girl who desperately wishes she had no needs. Therapists have described this as “very interesting” and “let’s circle back to that.”
“"My Twitter bio is 'girl with no needs,' which is a joke, because really I might describe myself as the girl with the most needs ever."”
NAME AN INFLUENCE OF YOURS THAT MIGHT SURPRISE PEOPLE.
My biggest influences are Kurt Vonnegut and the Christian mystic Margery Kempe. I have always loved the way Kurt wrote. I can’t read him too much while I’m writing or I start cribbing his style. Breakfast of Champions was my first real favorite book—I read it for the first time when I was maybe 13—and there’s a part in the beginning where he says, “I can’t live without a culture anymore.” I remember it just hit me like a ton of bricks. It sounds sort of silly and pretentious, and of course it’s a very 13-year-old realization, but it felt like I had been told some religious secret—I was like, Woah, there’s this thing called culture, and it matters more than almost anything else in the world.
WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN FOR?
I used to memorize random big words from the dictionary and shoehorn them into sentences for attention. Adults loved it, and it’s how I got almost all of my external validation. Now, using big words for attention is basically my entire life.
in your life?
