It was more like a constant stream for your life.
It’s not like you’d save up and tweet special thoughts. SHEILA HETI: I remember when I first started following you, I couldn’t believe how often you tweeted.
She seems to be one those people always in centre of the swirl of the debate-especially around feminist issues-while also managing to stand cooly outside it. She was also maybe the first “Twitter celebrity” to me, in that I knew her “Twitter work” before I had read any of her other writing. It almost seems part of her living-in the way that you wouldn’t say this breath is particularly important, while those twenty other breaths I took are less important. It’s possible that it was her, more than anyone else I follow, who made me begin to wonder: What is Twitter? She used the medium in the way other people did-posting links, declaring things-but in another way, too: as a constant running monologue, a real stream of consciousness, a literary Modernist on Twitter. There isn’t a sense of hierarchy among her now 80,000+ tweets. Roxane Gay, in addition to being a brilliant fiction writer, blogger and essayist (this season she published her collection Bad Feminist to huge acclaim), is a seasoned and constant Twitter user. In this series, I talk to some of my favourite people on Twitter about their Twitter philosophies and practices. Welcome to What Would Twitter Do? the ninth and three-quarter edition with Roxane Gay! Next week will be Week 10, the final interview.
