lyras asked: What's your favorite academic paper you ever wrote? Or creative thing, if you feel like it.

My favorite academic paper I wrote was for a fellowship in 2010, which was an extension of the research I did for a retrospective exhibition on the Victorian painter G.F. Watts at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. It’s sort of impossible to water down the topic in a coherent way so I’ll just link you to a teaser I wrote for my fellowship presentation. Besides being endlessly interesting and conveniently topical, I have a strong attachment to that project because it’s a thesis I discovered organically, out of pure research and curiosity and I’d be lying if I didn’t say luck, not one that was formulated for a seminar final or whatever.

In terms of creative stuff, anything I wrote that I didn’t really hate has either filtered into my Tumblr at some point or appears on my writing blog. I sifted through some old posts today and they all sort of make me cringe? HOWWWW do well-known, published authors deal with the self-loathing that comes with reading stuff you wrote years ago? How do you move past that impulse to distance yourself from the bullshit you put out in your 20s when it was a bestselling novel? Do you just harbor all that embarrassment until you die? Or is it like, if you’re a decent writer you don’t hate yourself for things you wrote that you don’t happen to like anymore and that’s just a complex I have personally.