Literary Birthday – 2 September – Rita Bullwinkel

Happy Birthday, Rita Bullwinkel, born on 2 September 1988.

Rita Bullwinkel Quotes

1. I wrote this book l because I wanted to remember how I felt when I was a young woman and obsessively competed in every sport I could find.
2. In the third grade I read over one hundred Nancy Drew novels – every Nancy Drew novel that had, at that time, been published. When I finished the series I was under the impression that there were no more books to read. Thank goodness there were.
3. Every time I read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf it shapeshifts. Passages I once thought were central often, upon rereading, fall away, and new passages take centre stage, as if the book is more tide pool than language.
4. With Headshot, it was a great challenge to have eight main characters, and to try to take each of their portraits with equal weight.
5. Literary portraits are so different depending on whether or not the narrative is in the first person.
6. I think writing and sports-playing are both obsessive, deluded acts where you have to have some will, and some ability to improvise, and some imagination. Writers are also massive addicts, and that seems related, too.
7. I try to notice things, although I think my powers are limited. I don’t keep a notebook, but I am an obsessive list-maker, but it’s almost as if as soon as I make the list, the list becomes irrelevant. Somehow, the making of the list is the only thing that seems to help me.
8. I recommend reading. I also recommend walking. I think a lot of bad writing happens when people write at a time when they do not want to write. I only write if I’m driven to it, if it feels like there is no other option than to begin.
9. I suppose the leap from being a reader to a writer is an opaque one. They are intertwined for me. I only became a writer when I became an obsessive reader. I’m not sure why I have a desire to write things, but it makes me feel more human than any other thing has thus far in my life.
10. I don’t work from outlines, though I wish I could. Sometimes I make them, and then immediately deviate from their course, so that the outline just becomes this relic of a thing that never could, or never will, be. I do try to wield the momentum of writing when I can grab it, and write in long, drawn-out bouts. There is energy there, when that happens.
11. I do think about the reader. I want my writing to be compelling for them. It is so much to ask of someone, to sit with your fiction, and so I am hyperaware of the need for brevity and momentum. In life and fiction, I have found that sentimentality is something that is not to be trusted. It’s not an honest feeling, and so I don’t find it moving.
12. My mind feels like a bigger space to play in. I used to only write very short stories, but now I write both very long and very short fiction. I feel I can hold a whole book in me. I wasn’t able to do that ten years ago, when I first began.

Source for quotes 1-3: The Booker Prizes and 4-8: The Creative Independent and 9-12: The Paris Review

Rita Bullwinkel is an American author and editor. She first gained attention with her 2018 short story collection, Belly Up, which received a Whiting Award in 2022. Her debut novel, Headshot, was published in 2024. The novel was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2025, Bullwinkel received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which honours a young American writer of great promise. Bullwinkel is also the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The White Review, Conjunctions, BOMB, and Guernica. She has received grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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