Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: An Interview

The following is an interview with author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. Sycamore discusses how she uses fiction to work through historical traumas, inviting readers to imagine the AIDS pandemic as not simply memory but as continuing crisis that necessitates desiring into the archive so that we might begin to understand AIDS. Trauma cannot be historically rendered—this is the catastrophe of this experience, past and present are affectively collapsed—so we must be creative in how we refuse to forget a pandemic that remains ongoing.