The Reading

‘How Do I Make More Time to Write?’

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:35:38 GMT

Dear reader,

Over the past several years, I have been obsessed with the idea of "having time to write." What this has meant: shut door, total silence, and words on the page. They were morning pages, writing down the bones, three hundred words a day, and words measured by production in quantity or time. This became even more severe when I went back to a day job over two years ago (which is shocking to realize). My focus became obsession with waking up as early as possible, outside of industrial time, like Toni Morrison with her coffee in hand, looking at the stars.

What was this obsession? My first thought is that it must be shame. Shame around failure, if writers are measured by the extent of our publications; shame that when I had the time to write, I wasn't able to produce the book I thought I would be able to. But I think also this shame must be coupled with ambition, at least. I want to write something great. I want to be proud of what I write. I want the voice within me, who hates how I lay exhausted, scrolling on my phone, to finally come back and say yes, they were proud of me. I want to be proud of myself, and in order to do it, I have to write. Perhaps I produce in order to prove I can afford my own love.

So ambition mediates what I am really after: the luxury of being away with myself, chipping away at exteriors to arrive at my own interiority. If I just write the right book, I say to myself, I'll be worthy of doing this all the time.

And yet, when I write with ambition, something changes in the words I write. My brow furrows; the words squeeze out of me and none of them are right. They are considered; they are intellectual; they are not art.

Ambition suits what can be seen and met on specific terms. As these years back at engineering have reminded me, I achieve what I set out to do when I know what it is. I often exceed it. The more time I have, the more I do. With art, it is not only having time to write that matters. The quality of that time matters too.

What has it meant, to make time for writing? There are all the practical concerns—meal prepping, scheduling with my partner, and acting out my belief that it's okay to rest. But even more important has been the state of my mind. I have spoken before of writing (or not) to one's cycle of the process, but there are daily cycles too. When I could no longer get up early, I begrudgingly started writing at night. One evening, I set a timer and finally did it by hand, and found that I hated everything I was putting down as I was going. The next morning, as I typed up the pages from the night prior, I found that there was merit to what I had written, and being much better rested, I could elaborate on it as well.

I like to think that I have learned my lesson to trust that there is no perfect place or time to write—just that I can, and that I have to, and that capitalism can spare a few minutes of the better hours of my day so I can get a line or phrase down. I'm sure I will forget this lesson one day again, and that some other writer, perhaps you, will remind me of it.

For there is a part of my obsession that is just for me. Beneath all that shame and longing and yes, cutthroat ambition, I am obsessed with my life. I want it to feel deeper, and richer, amidst all its calamity. I am obsessed with the names of birds calling out at dawn; I am obsessed, at this moment, with sketching the past. When I write, I know myself not as what I produce but what I've felt and what I love, pattering softly into words on the keyboard in front of me, or etching onto the surface of the blank page, which I might share with you.

‘How Do You Begin Again?’

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Yanyi, how do you begin writing again after a prolonged spell of not-writing? In many ways, I see writing kind of like a muscle — one that needs to be worked out in order to grow stronger. I’m also aware, though, that people need rest. That you need to live life, touch some grass, earn money, and just do other things that can enrich the writing practice. But I’m wondering, after you’ve done all that, how do you begin again? How do you get back in to the writing life?

Things change. Times change. Your life changes—the city around you changes, or you change cities. Cities of trash and bodega flowers and cities of not looking at your neighbors in the eye to cities of endless little libraries; cities of rain-wise gardens and crows thick in the trees; cities of mind and spirit.

I had forgotten that when things change, it is not just the laundry list of new doctors and grocery stores; not just the literal laundry, or the meals that must be made, or the dog walks we must go on. Even when the furniture’s settled in the living room and dust again has ravaged once-new and now familiar corners, my insides spring from here to there. Wondering about where the writing desk went, the routine gone with it.

I had forgotten about this: that there’s a lag between when one is physically present and when one becomes spiritually present in a new life. It could be a physical city, but it could also be a spiritual city—the city in which you learned to touch grass again, the city in which you do not love that person, the city in which you become a mother, or the city in which you no longer have one.

In New York, it took ten years, just like they told me. Although I’ve left, it still feels like home whenever I go back. Like Borges tracing the alleys of a city that he discovers are the folds of his own face.

It is not so much a matter of whether you’re writing or not writing. It’s more about where you are in this other transition—in a decade, say, of becoming in a new vantage point of your life. If you’ve been paying attention. If you are ready to.

By ready I don’t mean when you go back to writing because you feel guilty for not writing because, say, you are already famous, or you’re hoping to be. Sometimes, being ready means remembering a sweet happening after a long time away, and the sudden nostalgia that overcomes. More often than that, it’s an itch, a stray thought that comes in that asks if you want it and will have it. This happens gradually and repeatedly, until you have the energy to follow through. (That is how I ended up here, in this newsletter, writing to you again).

The energy and the noticing are important. If you find yourself thinking that you still have something better or more urgent to do, then the moment will disappear, and you won’t write, but it’s not a failure, it’s honest. One day that stray thought will come again, invite you as you may feel invited right now. Then, again: do you have the energy? Are you willing to make room, be silent, and, importantly, open yourself up to create, even if most of the time, what you write will fail? It’s only with energy, time, and attention that one continues to write and not just begin.

When you are ready in that way, here are a few things that have worked for me.

Make yourself a writing space. Clear off a desk that is only for writing, or furnish yourself with a kit that creates a writing space for you—a scarf you love, stones, a favorite dictionary. Then, pick a time to write. Nowadays, I’m writing between twenty minutes to an hour in the mornings and sometimes at night. I started with one short twenty-minute session. My only rule is that strict but low minimum for writing.

In recent years, I’ve been getting to know my mind and what sets me up for success. Use what works for you too. I accommodate my needs around time-awareness by using a physical timer that I bought for this very purpose. To help stimulate focus and stave off inattention, I have a separate user account on my laptop that I only use for writing. While I have access to the internet, I don’t log into email or messaging from there. It simulates working on a library computer, which has historically worked well for me.

I also keep a process journal. Some people have an excellent sense of long-term rewards. When it comes to art, that is not one of my mind’s strengths. When I am working on a painting, I can see exactly where I left off in a second. The case is not true for writing when, at volume, it is impossible to leave with an impression of the previous work without considerable review. A process journal has given me the gift of continuity between writing sessions. I simply write about what I’m going to work on, work on it, and then reflect on the writing session with ideas for what I want to do next. Instead of returning to a blank page the next day, I work on the prompts I’ve given myself from the last.

This continuity is crucial in that it helps me track my progress even if I’m not upping word counts every day. Writing is a long-haul art. The rewards of finishing a novel or a collection of poetry are few and far between. A process journal rewards me not for brilliance, but for showing up. It holds the energy that comes before and after what other people want—it reflects back proof that I was here.

Going back to writing isn’t just a matter of starting somewhere. There is no blank page. Look closely at where you really are. You’re returning, but you want something new from your art. You won’t write how you used to. There are new lines and new stops. If you want to return, make your aim to be not just starting where you are, but also setting up structures that aid you and witness you. Writing again is about knowing where you are, where you are going, and how you’re going to get there. And how you’re going to get lost getting there. And always, at the end of it, how you are and will be getting home.

‘How Do I Give Myself a Residency?’

Thu, 04 May 2023 12:34:23 GMT

As someone who likely won't be able to do the usual rotation of summer writer’s workshops and so on due to financial and work constraints, some guidance on how to carve out a week and structure it in favor of writing would be greatly helpful.

Marie Kondo has her method for a reason. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up , she emphasizes that tidying should not be done in a slow, piecemeal way, but all at once. She explains that this is because being able to feel the immediate benefit of a tidied home—a home catered to your ideal life—creates the emotional benefit necessary to keep it that way.

Residencies, especially the ones that eliminate your usual household chores, do this with your writing practices. They eliminate the noise of usual life. If you’ve landed a fancy residency, you’re in a castle or your daily lunch appears stealthily in a wicker basket, so there’s also a waft of magic in the air.

Most likely, you’ll begin your journey for a self-given residency not in a castle. There are no lunches in wicker baskets. In fact, your house is a mess and your fridge has been empty for a while, leading you to scrounging around for lentils and eating pickles over the sink for the last few days.

For capitalism, we go into debt with our lived lives. The laundry chair piles high into the laundry pyramid; the slow-draining sink collects human and non-human debris; the sticky fridge holds only last night’s takeout and a stray beer. Residencies also temporarily relieve us from these realities—and the shame of being this way.

The operative term here is “give.” Isn’t it so much easier to receive those lunch baskets when your application was selected out of thousands? Achievements are the balloons a deflated ego holds onto for a little while. Thus, the hardest part about giving yourself a residency is neither time nor money: it’s believing, without external validation, that you are worthy of having it.

The self-given residency begins before the actual residency period you’ve planned. Here’s a familiar anecdote: you sit down to write and do so for a few minutes. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice the laundry pile at the other side of the room. You are overcome with the compulsion to clean it and, in fact, every chore you have put off until now comes into view. Rather than writing for that whole day, you end up cleaning your house.

I have heard (and lived) this story countless times. However, rather than seeing it as a moment of procrastination, I find it logical that we do this. It’s self-care; it’s acknowledgement that writing is an intensive activity that is easier with peace-of-mind. And doesn’t it feel good when the last of everything has been put away? To know that your next few days of meals are taken care of, so you can really get to work?

The self-given residency begins before the residency period because for at least two weeks prior, you’ll be doing these chores from your inner task list. Let writing be the motivator and be comforted that there’s no end of residency flashing ahead. You are going to start your self-given residency by taking care of yourself.

It’s only in this relaxed state of mind, as you are repairing the ways you’ve neglected your needs, that it becomes less overwhelming to imagine how you’ll meet your desires.

Visualize aspects of your ideal residency and create approximates at your self-given one. The writing-related ideals are easiest to capture. If you have a specific project in mind, I’ve had friends who excelled with rules around daily goals, such as reaching a word count or drafting just one poem, even a bad one. Without a project, I’ve given myself a lot of leeway to read for as long as I want. Giving myself the right intellectual environment creates the conditions for some writing to appear.

If you imagine yourself punctuating your days with stop-and-chats with fellow artists at a traditional residency, it may be enough for you to watch documentaries on other artists and to read others’ work. But it could also be beneficial to link up with friends who time their self-given residencies at the moment and meet up every day in-person or over video chat.

If you see yourself taking walks to clear your head in the moors, perhaps choose different routes you can take around your neighborhood or choose a library or working space you can go to outside your home.

Don’t cook your residency meals in the moment. Schedule delivery every night, if you’d like—or cook your own frozen meals the weekend before, but make sure to include the extra things—your favorite ice cream, a charcuterie board—you’d never usually spend on yourself. Make it as easy as possible for you to get lost in thought while sustaining your energy and delighting your senses.

It’s possible to do this at a smaller scale, too, and without as much preparation. Almost ten years ago, I would go to a library every Saturday with only the intention of reading poetry for a few hours. Some writing, of course, crept in unexpectedly. That was a residency. Five years ago, I started committing to no-plan Saturdays, which meant that I’d wake up at 6am those days and read and write for as long as physically possible, until usually around noon. By then, I’d clamber downstairs and take myself out to a nice solo brunch at the diner around the corner. That was also a residency.

Nowadays, I’ve written this letter to you broken up over several days and weeks sometime between 6am and 8am. I have a special chair and configuration of light; I write in a journal to dump all the “junk” in my mind about my daily life before I get started with other writing. Is this a residency? It feels more like my daily residence.

It has gotten easier, over time, to write badly. It turns out that giving myself permission to do so has given me access to different registers of my voice—for a more casual letter to be possible, for example, but also a more spiritual or silly one. If you give yourself the leeway to experiment with how and when you write, your self-given residency will also have many forms. It will be less about that specific pocket of time and more about picking a time, a place, a chair, a light—and coming home to your art, as often as you want.

‘How Did You Decide to Return to Your Day Job?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:55:51 GMT

How did you decide to return to software engineering and how has that shaped your days and wellbeing? I feel like I have unfortunately over-invested in the idea of ‘being a writer’ as ‘your primary day job is adjacent to writing.’

Primarily, I had stopped writing my own work. I wrote over 100 drafts in 2019, the year I left my job. In 2020, the year I started teaching, 25. In 2021, the year I went on the academic job market, 20.

Writing careers are just as you say: your primary job is adjacent to writing, not writing itself. When I was writing, it was for the public, the job committee, students, or a future book deal. I was writing full-time but had even less time to work on creative projects. I was busy trying to economically survive.

Economic instability also trapped my ability to make changes in my life. Despite doing well as a writer, I didn’t have enough. I couldn’t buy a house (denied for a mortgage), couldn’t move, and was vulnerable to losing all my savings in emergencies. Without that flexibility, I couldn’t physically protect myself from the racial and gender unease I’ve been feeling since I moved to rural Vermont.

That desperation made every win and rejection more powerful. A job was not just a job—it was everything that a salary, benefits, and the title “professor” brings in our world. The opacity of the literary and academic world—due to disorganization, nepotism, or systemic inequality—stirred doubt into every impression I had of who I was. Was this bias, or was I not good enough? The trouble with uncertainty is that both things may be true. I acted accordingly, working harder to be “good enough” without a rubric or guarantee.

I did not go back to tech earlier because I was making a life for myself. Tech represented economic stability to me, but not much else. It wasn’t until I started learning more about my neurodivergence, particularly around focus, that it became clear that a day job with clear tasks, deadlines, and fewer social demands was a much better choice for my daily life.

I’m happy to say that I’m now writing more than I ever have since I moved to Vermont in 2020. The structure of the day job structured my writing life, too, and now I’m typing this in the morning hours when I return to myself each day. I feel well at my job, which I don’t think about when I log off each day. I also feel seen and appreciated by my coworkers.

Our car broke down last month, but I’m in the process of buying another one. I’m moving to Seattle this summer. I’m also not done teaching. I’ll be on the poetry faculty at Warren Wilson’s MFA program this coming term. I’m really looking forward to working with more students with non-traditional writing backgrounds like me.

I’m also working on a couple of big projects, which I’ll announce in the near future. In the meantime, I’m so glad to be writing to you again!

‘You Are More Than Your Writing.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The Reading is going on hiatus on July 31, 2022. Why this is happening. A last piece of advice. Near and possible futures.

On July 31, 2022, The Reading will go on a long hiatus. All letters, Writing Space sessions, and Hotpot session will cease. All paid memberships as of that date will be paused and resumed only in the event of my return with a paid tier. All posts will remain up. Paid posts will remain visible to anyone with a paid membership. The last Writing Space will be on July 26, 2022. At the moment, no return date is set.

This has been such a difficult decision that I’ve put it off for almost a year. I don’t ever doubt that these letters have been of incredible value to you. In fact, the undeniable impact of every letter to you and others, be it in comfort, practicality, or renewal, have kept me going every month I thought I would make this announcement. That, too, has changed. For the past several months, new submissions to the letterbox have slowed to a trickle. That in itself has felt like a message about the want, and need, for this form of The Reading .

It is okay for things to end. Sometimes they don’t, but I do believe that everything, even the good things, deserve a chance to end. You might know what I mean. Because there is no end built in, podcasts, television shows, and newsletters are so easy to keep doing despite flags that sign otherwise, losing much of what made them special in the first place.

There are very few places where artists are not asked to perform to prove the worthiness of our lives. Many of the viable options for financial sustainability still require performance in applications for grants, authority for students, expertise for other faculty, profundity for literary events, and constancy for social media followings. Even writers’ residencies, which are intended for producing new work, require projects to be described and samples to be offered. Everywhere, all at once, the label of artist rests in the existing work, not the person who is trying to make it.

What is the end of all this performance? And why are we writers obsessed with having time even more than having money? Perhaps the point is to avoid the end—the making in the present itself. Perhaps I feel that when I prove myself an artist, I can be worthy of having my own time. The time to luxuriate in process; to read what I want; to write badly until it is interesting—not competent, not even good, but something else. Something like a world I want to stay in. Something beyond myself now.

In many of these letters, I’ve been challenged to offer not only you but also myself new ways of approaching the travails of the writing life. I have taught the epiphanies I had just had, hot off the press, induced in part thanks to the letters you have sent me. To get to the end of a performance, to stop waiting for permission from the ghosts who never let me stop, I must stop performing. It seems appropriate, then, that this last piece of advice be an act, not a letter.

I won’t completely disappear. I’ll pop into social media . I will update this newsletter with brief announcements from time to time. I do hope, one day, to make this run of The Reading a book—a friend—that you can hold in your hands.

I’m going to take some time to figure out what’s next—perhaps there will be more voices and, one day, a new, limited column. But for now, I’m going to honor my ‘no.’ I have written 51 letters, 21 postscripts, and 58 short craft thoughts to tell you, really, one thing: you are more than your writing. Now, as ever, on with the work.

‘I’m So, So Tired of Having to Justify My Writing.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in a writing workshop at a place with a recognizable name, the kind where you say you’re doing a class there and people know what you’re talking about. I was super excited to get in but am feeling quite ambivalent about it now because of my fellow writers’ critiques. I was uncomfortable the first week when a peer commented another writer’s sample that it was was too “insert slur here” for him. The moderator cut him off and said that wasn’t a helpful comment but it had already been made. I was nervous to show my work because I’m Chinese American and my work deals with race.

In the session about my work, there were a few comments that left me laughing after class and then crying. An example of what was said: a white man commented that the dialogue with a Chinese character felt very real to him, which he would know as he was married to a Chinese woman.

The one that has me thinking still is when an elderly white writer brought up how he couldn’t get past the fact my protagonist had an “American” name while her parents were Chinese immigrants. Why wouldn’t they name her a Chinese name? The issue is I had written a scene where the mother talks about her daughter’s name as one of the few things her abusive husband let her have control of and how her daughter is named after herself. So now that comment has me thinking do I keep the scene in and in a way, answer that question for the white reader, or do I cut it out, because I don’t want to cater to a white audience? I had the realization that these are the types of comments and people I’d have to deal with when showing others my work and the feeling of weariness just overwhelmed me. I am so, so tired of having to justify myself.

Writing has been a safe space for me and this is my first foray into having other writers read my work. I knew workshop wouldn’t necessarily be a happy endeavor (it’s always hard to hear criticism) but I thought at the least, writers, who know how difficult writing is, would comment with care. I read Craft in the Real World before my class and observed the differences in how white and minority writers are treated in workshop but still, naively, didn’t think my class would be like that. I still perceived the writing community as a group that tries to see complexity and tries to see beyond the stereotypes that exist in real life. At least that’s what I try to do in my work. There are people in my workshop who do that, but there are also ones who have the privilege of saying what they want without care to others. What I experienced felt like a microcosm of the world around me that dehumanizes me to my race, one that tells me I have to do more work and explain myself in a way to justify my place in the world. Basically, I feel extremely disillusioned about writing and in a way, robbed of what I thought writers were, what writing does and what it could do.

Part of me wants to keep my writing to myself now, to treat it as something I do for only me but another part of me wants my words to be out there, published, because I do believe I have something important to say. How do I continue on after this? Should I even continue? Do I even want to?

Thank you.

Lost in Doubts

Dear LID,

Thank you for your letter. It is unfortunate that you had such an unpleasant wake-up call at this workshop, and that it’s turned you off from writing, possibly forever. Who could blame you! Yet, at the end of your letter, you speak of writing as a safe space for you, some of that coming from your faith in the intentions of the larger writing community as one open to complexity and difference.

Unfortunately, bad experiences often do eclipse the good in hindsight. In your case, a workshop member says something is too “insert slur here” about another’s writing. A white man says a Chinese character is real to him because he’s married to a Chinese woman. Another white writer deems a Chinese American character’s name as “too American” for her parentage. In each of these examples, the battle is not over authenticity of culture but an authority of truth: the right to tell a story, any story, and, through that, to claim the line between belonging and unbelonging, real or fake, right or wrong.

Perhaps it is a mark of hegemony that one’s lived experience can’t be true in itself. One’s experience must stick to other authorities, be verified as correct. Correctness is about who, ultimately, has the power to include or exclude, not the person whose experience it was.

Ownership is a totalizing thing, and totalizing conquest has no room for rebel details or unmapped parts. A story is not a story, but an artifact of knowledge—another piece of the world that can be taken, absorbed, and owned by an empire.

In other words, these critiques were not about the specific details of any one story you read in workshop. They enforced a larger kind of story: the one where those in power in an empire decide what’s real in this world; the one where it is their version, not yours, that counts as correct.

You saw these workshoppers playing out those power dynamics, and you responded accordingly. First, there’s anger (should you change that scene to stick it to the man?) and then resign (disappearance back into private life). But, you wonder, can you have more choices than mere reaction or disappearance? Is there a way back to freedom and safety in writing again?

Justifications are arguments for outside authorities. If you’re tired of making them, you have to ask to whom you want to answer in your writing. Will you continue to give your power to the hegemonic authorities you don’t even respect? Or will you look to your communities? To yourself?

This is your fork in the path. You have learned that you are not like other writers. You might have learned, too, that you will not be able to write like other writers. Your value, your power, lies in your difference, your difficulty, your ineffability, sometimes even to yourself. To express yourself in public, you must discover who you want to be there. To write, you have to discover how, and by whom, you want to be read.

I, like many more writers you’ll discover, have developed my own practices around this: implication and diversion. They both revolve around what I think of as raced words and subjects. They both require specificity to be successful. The truth is, having been “discovered” as a raced person from a very young age has made me intuitively an expert at racism’s moves. I know the words that, once read, are like flags in the racist’s brain, making them scramble for more context clues, more pieces of the story they know.

In the implied mode, I talk about my experiences without actually using any flagging words. Specificity is important in that one specific statement or metaphor can set off a shared cultural understanding that only another person of that experience could know or want.

In the diverted mode, I do use flagging words, but I move my writing beyond the expected path. This is a kind of difficulty that is playful refusal, the purposeful lie. For example, when I was younger, I would give outlandish answers to the question “Where are you from?”

These are just two ways to claim one’s own difficulty, to incorporate it as a part of one’s practice. What’s become important to me, and could be for you, has been returning to the reason I became a writer in the first place: to write the books that challenged me; that voiced thoughts I myself had not gotten to, or hadn’t dared to get to; that give me more ways to choose my life.

There is nothing new about empire. There is nothing new about racism. To respond only to these terms and systems, to play exclusively in or out of their imposed realities, would be to underestimate how stories all meet each other in the collective imagination.

Now, your challenge of difficulty will be different from mine. Perhaps your work directly uses the terms and scenarios I avoid or play with in my own work. Perhaps there’s no option to get around—you must get through. Then my advice to you is to be sure of the mark you’re aiming for. Ask yourself if you’ve found your own experience illuminated by the process of writing. Choose ambitions beyond the roles hegemony has laid out for you. Ask if it will help someone who has been searching for the same thing as you.

I can’t and won’t dictate where you should go next. Transformation is exhausting. It requires more energy you could be putting towards your art. It requires strength to stay optimistic that yet another lesson, at this moment, would make you stronger in the future. Sometimes you fail to learn the lesson, if there is one. Sometimes you do suffer.

You will find that your writing will change no matter what you do. Sometimes you change it little by little, thinking you’re staying still. This kind of change is easy in that more often than not, you don’t notice that it’s happening. You make a choice to say yes when you mean no once or twice a year. You shift the precedents for yourself. It’s that change you must watch out for. The kind that ends with you forgetting which path to take, or why you’re on the journey at all.

Writing, like all art, can be a site of safety, freedom, imagination. It can hold futures and dreams, our best memories, our worst. But because we deal in language, it seems inevitable that each writer, at one time or another, must confront other uses of writing, its place in a larger structure of power, and that structure’s hold on our social hierarchies. How we take in these moments, how we react to our knowledge of them—that is what makes the difference in the kind of writing we can hope to do.

The nice thing about going your own way is that you’re already “wrong”—but in your wrongness, in being off the map, you can stay free for a little while longer. To become that writer requires a radical act of imagination. More than one. And then the courage to choose yet another path. To keep moving, and know that there is truth and strength in that.

‘Can I Still Write My Memoir If It Exhausts Me?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I studied creative writing in undergrad and graduated in 2015 with 15,000 words of a memoir that I continue to be proud of. The book focuses on the loss and grief in my childhood, through the lens of the suburban neighborhood I grew up in. It’s written as a collage, where multiple important people in my life are shared with the reader through everything from script-like conversations to short scenes, before many of those important people pass away. It is also still far from being a completed manuscript.

Truthfully, the reason this collage style works so well for my memoir is because my experiences with grief and other trauma left my memories holey, at best, and the text is a reproduction of how my brain recalls the first 16 years of my life.

The problem that I’ve been running up against for the last seven years is the fact that continuing to write this memoir is so emotionally challenging for me that I’m unable to squeeze in an hour of work here or there because that hour then requires multiple hours of emotional recovery. I wouldn’t be surprised if this prompted the idea of attending therapy, which is something I’ve been on a journey with for the last few years already. It has helped me off the page, but this particular problem continues to keep me from deep-diving into this work that I believe in wholeheartedly.

The Midwestern-American-raised part of my brain keeps trying to say “power through” or “you’re being lazy,” and other such unhelpful and self-sacrificing catchphrases. I have had extensive positive feedback from a variety of professors and other writers over the years, and received a prize for an excerpt from the text, and I think part of this inner dialogue stems from the intrinsic “you should’ve been done writing this already” subliminal messaging I glean from those same professors and writers now.

I think that part of the answer is simply Sit Down And Write, which makes sense. I'm not naive enough to think that finishing this memoir will be a painless process. Perhaps, though, I’m naive enough to believe that revising a few pages or drafting a scene of neighborhood night tag shouldn’t leave me emotionally hollow?

Thank you so much for your time.

Sincerely,
Healing-ish (she/her)

Kansas City, Missouri

Dear H,

Thank you for your letter. It sounds as though this book has become a tremendous occasion for you to cope and reflect on a formative period of your life. It’s also clear that something about it is stuck, and it has been for at least the past seven years.

This inner conflict you’ve shared with me isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of change. If you can pinpoint a time in your life when you would have just kept going without a second thought, then it’s change that’s already happened.

In the past, perhaps you wouldn’t have listened to that emotional exhaustion and paused your writing. Perhaps you would have dismissed therapy as not for you. You would have powered through the book. But what would that book have been?

You didn’t choose that book. You chose no book, which is, from your letter, where you’re feeling some doubt now. But are you just someone with no book? I don’t think so. I think you gave up not the book, but one version of this book. And, in return, you chose much, much more than nothing. You chose to preserve yourself.

No major lesson in life is learned only once. The world will test how much you want to change. Time and again, things loop around. There’s a prickly occasion for encounter; for the same old arguments to reanimate. And for you, H, that occasion is this 15,000 word manuscript you’ve got in your (proverbial) drawer.

This manuscript is a fragment of that Book That Could Have Been. It’s a talisman of you from 2015—it carries the prize you won, the professors and writers you impressed, and the dead you want to honor. It holds all your old ambitions and the ghosts of why you had them. In order to write into this book, you must take on the vantage point of the person who was writing it.

Who was this person? Someone for whom others’ opinions mattered (your former admirers). Someone who wanted to keep the dead alive (writing down your memories of important people before they passed away). Someone who, despite all the pain you can feel now, would have kept going.

Powering through any task, small or large, is rarely about what you have right now. When you power though a task that you dislike, a task that is even harmful to you, there’s always a goal, a core belief you hold, that you’re convinced will be fulfilled on the other side.

Perhaps this person’s belief was survival. They powered through because they were alone, and there wasn’t anyone to help them. They couldn’t afford to be weak, to feel the things they were meant to feel in the moment. Eventually, they powered through out of sheer habit, because that’s what they’d gotten good at.

But you, dear H, wouldn’t do that. You can hear that voice but won’t listen to it. Perhaps you’ve found more choices in the ways you can live. In seven years, you’ve begun to transform. So perhaps the person who was writing this memoir doesn’t actually exist anymore.

I’m not telling you to give up on this book you so believe in. But I will guess that it means more to you than just a literary escapade. This manuscript is “a reproduction of…the first 16 years of [your] life.” It’s the “holey” version, the one that can’t quite come into focus, because the memories themselves are not quite in focus. But they’re all you have. They’re shards you’ve kept of a former life. They’re the relics you keep coming back to.

I don’t know the circumstances of your losses, but grief takes us away from ourselves too, whether it’s to the rites we must observe when we lose the ones we love or tending to the silences they leave behind. That’s part of grief, isn’t it? Animating the bodies of the long-dead through our bodies. Giving them a bit of space to stay a while, if only just in our lives, borrowing our sight, our smell, our laughter, our sorrows. We let the dead haunt us because we miss them. We want them around.

Who or what were you honoring? How? In what ways was your memoir first about other people? What was it to you?

Perhaps also you wanted to be recognized. Perhaps you needed love and admiration when you had lost so much. Perhaps sharing your pain was a way of holding that. Perhaps safety was in another person telling you that yes, you were doing something right. That yes, you were wanted. That you had a place here.

But using your energy to buy the pleasure of others meant that you were always poor in what you could give yourself. And there comes a point of saturation when we deplete ourselves in the name of others. The dead can’t give us their selves. Nor can the living, even the ones who love us. They need themselves back, eventually. So do you.

What will you make of your life when it’s no longer about being with someone else, dead or living? Who will you be when you’re not in relation to another person?

That’s the cinch—the most painful part. Because choosing to act for yourself means confronting a very painful thing: that you are alone, and that you have been alone for a long while.

You never asked to be alone, but you ended up alone. All these years, instead of facing this truth about your life, it’s been easier to dwell with those who have passed on. It’s been easier to search for others to replace them. Who can blame you? You were so young. You didn’t deserve to lose that love. You had to go through more than you were ready for. And you did so valiantly, it seems. You did the best you could.

But now, because of this book, you’ve come upon another opportunity. After spending the last decade of your life protecting yourself from loneliness, it might be time to be alone. Whatever happened to you shouldn’t have happened to you then. But you need your whole self in order to write the next version of this book. It’s time to reclaim the selves you left behind to watch over the past. It’s time to be all here, all and only for yourself. Perhaps the book you want to write now is an altogether different book. It’s a book not for others. It’s a book for you.

Life gives us funny metaphors. It’s possible your memoir stayed incomplete for so long because you were also “holey” at the time you started writing it. You’re proud of it because you’re proud of the person you were then, the person you were able to become despite all that happened to you. When no one, alive or living, was able to love you, you loved yourself.

Transforming this manuscript into a different one isn’t abandoning that self. It’s honoring them too. Honoring that they still could grow and change. Honoring not only the scale of losses in their life but also the joy and surprise still possible in it. That person would have wanted you to have what you do now, what you will have soon. I think they would be proud of you and support what you’re about to do. Write to them. Let them know what’s next.

‘How Do I Find Joy in Big Writing Projects?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Over the past year, I’ve been reflecting on how writing has lifted me up from lulls and difficult times, mostly because it’s been failing to do so of late. It’s been jolting to realize that I’ve relied upon the pleasure I get from making a good sentence, and later from the calm of completing something I worked on, for my well being more than anything else for the past ten years. I’m at a bit of a loss now that the once-reliable bootstrapping technique is failing me. I have been lucky to have good support systems in my life, but protracted pandemic isolation has made it harder to find resonance in some of those other places as well.

I recently told someone that I liked writing for how quickly I could close the execution gap between what I wanted to make (a sentence) and that thing existing in the world. In contrast, making visual art when I was younger felt like I was constantly working against a technique deficit where nothing I made lived up to my ideas. I really enjoy the buzz of generating an idea, and then tending to it with relative immediacy and bringing it into the world, as I discovered with writing short stories and essays in college. Now, writing a dissertation (and, lately, tending to the seedlings of an idea for a novel that took me by surprise) is a much different kind of writing that involves far more revision and refinement than ideation. I’ve continued to write shorter pieces of criticism and collaborative writing along the way to break up some of these longer timelines, but even then, finishing up something no longer feels quite as satisfying. I wonder if my evolving sense of what “good writing” is, as I become more disciplined in my academic practice, is precluding access to what I instinctively came to love about writing in the first place.

So I really have two connected questions, I suppose: how do I find joy in writing projects of different scales which involve processes that I find more laborious, and as the execution gap between the idea and what the work needs to become grows once again? And, what do I do if writing is has come to be the best way I know to ground myself, and that joy is suddenly eluding me? Thank you so much for your care in reading–The Reading has always been such a salve.

With thanks,
Fizzy Gone Flat

Singapore

Dear FGF,

It’s good that you’ve noticed your fizz has gone flat here, and that you’ve taken steps to jumpstart it again. Perhaps I can add to your perspective, and you’ll be able to see something with my observations that either of us alone wouldn’t have been able to do.

First, let’s talk about the larger picture here. Writing may have been comforting for you in the past because it was a place where you can be by yourself. After years of pandemic, where protracted isolation has been the norm, to be alone may no longer feel particularly freeing. The world brings not only obligations, but also affirmation and difference—expansions of what’s possible, ways to be in our bodies more than a head and torso on a screen. Perhaps the joy eluding you partly has to do with how you want—and should have—more than that.

Writing about or with others is not the same as these encounters. Encounter, something lived, happens on accident or surprise. No matter how much one loves writing, there is only so much that can happen solely on the page. The page is the aftermath to something lived. And if your main way of soothing yourself, up until now, has been writing, then it’s possible you’ve written through all the things lived, and it’s time for you to replenish with a little more of living.

Writing from encounter is for you . It’s writing you do to make sense of your own life. So criticism, collaborative writing, and the long haul of a dissertation, although they involve more voices than you, are limited in that the writing is not just for you. Writing with or about others always involves more than one priority in the writing. You can’t truly be alone.

I now want to turn to your second question about changing scales of work. A few of your statements give me the sense that you’re someone who likes getting things done quickly. Your interim solution for the long timelines of a dissertation and novel was to pursue shorter projects. Unfortunately, these projects didn’t satisfy you, so now you’re wondering if your taste has changed.

As you say in your letter, you liked writing for how fast you could go from idea to execution. I wonder if your dissatisfaction comes not from taste but from the reality that your true ideas right now are these two big projects, and these other projects you’ve given yourself are just not offering you the same kind of challenge.

Long works are different than short ones because they make us show our work. Their length and ambition demands it. Thanks to your early ease with writing, this may not have been something you had to do when you first started. You had to reach a kind of project that would truly challenge you and alas, there’s finally appeared not one, but two!

In the past, I’ve mistaken my own experience as a reader with my experience as a writer. Years before attempting a book of poetry on my own, I read enough to recognize when a collection was good. However, just because I could recognize what I wanted to make didn’t mean I knew how to make it.

Any artist worth their salt has to go through, and learn, their growing pains. If you’re already good, the end-product comes out immediately. You don’t see the weird in-between state. You don’t have as many experiences of reassuring yourself that this imperfect thing will grow into a beautiful butterfly, and that that can actually happen. You just have the imperfect thing. And perhaps you feel some shame when you look at it, so you try your hardest to revise it into shape the moment it hits the page, which makes the whole experience especially laborious.

That is, the impulse to scrub a sentence is the same one that compels a child to hide a bad grade under the couch. Perhaps you want to hide the parts of you that aren’t talented, that aren’t naturally good—the parts that can’t go from zero to a hundred in three seconds flat. Did your caretakers expect you to be like this, when you were young? Trace the feelings of impatience with yourself. Who told you to hurry up when you weren’t getting it fast enough—enough that it seemed no longer worth it to carry on with the things that weren’t fast? What makes you feel like you’re not fast enough?

Your writing process can reflect the way you treat yourself. What parts of your writing do you wish you could leave behind? The parts that you don’t want to admit live inside you, that may even help your process feel a little freer or enjoyable? You could seem more genius, more desirable to some parties, when you erase everything between the equation and the answer. But every artist has a process. Every person takes a bit of living between their best ideas and what they execute. You don’t have to be exceptional to make exceptional art. You don’t have to be exceptional to be loved—or to love yourself.

No matter how quickly you try to tackle a large project, it is, by nature, made by seeing—and often going through—the innards. The large sloshy novel needs all those phalanges in order to move. That hefty dissertation requires every piece of background research, analysis, and new research you’ll have to do for it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no talent that gets you a dissertation in a day.

Going through the belly of the beast may be painful and difficult for you because you may be imposing that learned impatience on yourself while also learning, and being humbled by, the behemoth of the task you’ve set for yourself. You have to learn how to write again. It is writing that requires much more revision, as you say, but also writing that needs to be rough before it’s good. And thus you have to learn how to write roughly and leave it, not just to finish the work, but to allow it to grow, however messily it needs. It’s often the wayward sentences that mark new directions when I’m stuck or my document of “cuttings” that end up growing new ideas altogether.

I say this because there are ways to make both your novel and dissertation more creatively satisfying, but they require that you contend with your feelings of perfectionism and shame. You need to be able to witness your writing’s loosest, strangest forms. You need to be able to put things down on the page that feel easy, even casual, as if you were explaining things not to your dissertation adviser or a literary agent, but a friend who already likes your work. You must become that friend to your writing. You must become that friend to yourself.

Without capitalism and careerism, what is the point of creating a long work? For me, writing a long piece allows me to track a thought larger than I could handle in my mind. A long work is not just a work of creation, but a work of synthesis and connection. The tradeoff, however, is feeling a bit lost on the way to making the bits that are supposed to stick together. There’s a lot more exploration necessary.

Instead of your in-between state looking like a book sequentially being written, paragraph after perfect paragraph, give your mind freedom to roam, to tack on, and to expand as you are writing. You may go off the rails of the plan, but perhaps your plan was a little too expected, even for you, and there’s discovery you can allow yourself around the corner.

To find pleasure in a book, you need to find the trick that will unlatch your mind to the point where you feel like you’re speaking, not pushing words onto a page. It’s the moment when a voice in your head takes over, is just a little bit ahead of what you’ve got on the page. It’s when you’re confident of the direction you’re going, not the destination it will be.

So many of the things that matter in life don’t happen after we’ve had years to plan for them. They show up and then we must react and discover ourselves anew—new parts that give us the mettle to move on from first relationships and homes, or the parts that can live on, and through, a death of a loved one. You and I—we can show up for ourselves. Not as experts, but as people working on each new challenge the best that we can.

If you want pleasure and surprise in your writing, and your life, you must let yourself have it. And perhaps in doing so, you’ll write a whole new version of yourself. But you need to invite the process in order to do it.

‘Lately, All My Stories Fall Short.’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi Yanyi. I’m at a standstill where writing fiction is concerned. I’ve been writing consistently for a few years and I’ve been lucky to have a writing community to support me and give me feedback. Lately, every time I finish a story, I feel like I’m aware of how the story falls short and my limitations as a writer. I’ve been struggling to improve my understanding of my craft and how to make it better. I’m also a little frustrated at how long it takes me to finish a story. Any advice?

Karachi

Dear ___,

I so, so sympathize with how long it takes to write, and to learn how to write. In your letter, you share that you’ve done the legwork to build a writing life with both a routine and a community, which is great. Perhaps you have completed and even published some stories already.

Before I go any further, I have to make some conjectures from your letter, as you don’t say how your work is falling short. Where is the compass, exactly? The craft advice you’re reading and the published work you’re reading? Or some intuitive, inchoate sense within you that the stories just don’t work? I will try my best to answer your question with both of these separate possibilities, but just a heads up that I’ll lean in the direction of the latter.

Your frustration with your latest work sounds like peering into a bricked-up window. No matter how much you can visualize the image of the parlor beyond, you don’t yet have the tools to chip that wall away. That frustration, however, is also an indicator of a good thing: you’ve outgrown the stories you’ve been writing. You’ve read enough fiction to recognize what’s good, but you can’t bridge the gap between what you want and what you can do.

If you’re feeling that your work is inadequate because it doesn’t seem to match what’s out there right now, remember that craft is a retroactive amalgamation of other writers’ processes and creations. It reflects what’s past, not what’s yet to come. You are the one who tries for what’s coming. Attempting the unknown is how an artist grows.

While I strongly believe that every person’s writing journey is different, I do believe we all have our own stages in learning to write—stages I differentiate by symptoms and feelings more than career markers. These stages aren’t linear. They cycle in and out and I often experience them all at once. And each of these learning stages has a catch: you must confront one of your flaws to grow, a flaw that only you can discover. You need your own honest judgment to do that.

Experience has given me an advantage not because I’m innately better at what I do, but because I’ve gone through this dance already. I know what to expect from myself, including the tendencies I have to gum up my own process.

My flaw as a beginner is that I don’t finish things. At first, this is good, because finishing is not the point: I shush my internal critics enough to fully experiment, discover, and fail. I delight myself when I make something I do like. It’s safer not to finish things—unfinished work can’t be judged. It’s not for public consumption. It’s a kind of protection. Eventually, though, I’m sitting on a big pile of beginnings with no endings. Eventually, growth means I have to complete the work I started.

Then there’s the intermediate stage, a phase that’s for me most beset by blocks and frustration. Here, I’ve usually found one way of writing that I’m very good at. It’s a comfortable place, but narrow. I mistake that circumscribed style as the whole of my potential.

That is, I believe I’m good, but only in one way. Perhaps a workshop instructor said a kind thing once, or only certain pieces I write are getting accepted. It’s harder to learn at this time because your work is more public. Even if it’s just within a private writing group, you start to be “known” for something—and it feels good to have that niche!

Yet, the more I write in only one way, the less I make of it, in all senses of the phrase. I will labor over one poem over the span of six months or avoid writing until inspiration strikes. When I force myself to write, I repeat myself with the same images, rhythms, or epiphanies, and they begin to lose their color. It doesn’t matter if they are called good or even genius. Eventually I lose interest in my own work. Inspiration strikes fewer and further between.

“What’s missing in me?” is the unconscious question I’m asking when I spring for yet another how-to guide, as though I haven’t read most of them already. I treat my writing like I treat myself—something to be formed into the perfect specimen.

At a certain point, you have to flip the script from “What’s missing in me?” to “What I am I missing from writing?” To be clear, this is not about what’s missing in your writing. You can’t improve your writing unless it’s genuinely moving—you are the compass for that. Writing is experienced and, in order to grow, you must treat it as your experience.

Think back to why you first started writing. Was there a feeling you got from books that changed your life? Where did your love of writing first come from? Does it still hold up, or have things changed? Why or why not?

Feeling limited isn’t necessarily about the stories you’re writing right now—it can be coming from how you’re limiting yourself from enjoying your own writing. In your attempts to improve, your critical faculties might be going full-blast, and they’re telling you not to go here or there; they’re instructing you to follow this or that. At a certain point, you’re boxed into the tiny overlap of a hundred other writers’ Venn diagrams.

If you are not feeling discovery, joy, or experiment in your work, if you aren’t giving yourself a reason not only to begin but also to continue, your work will stagnate. It will reach for foregone conclusions which, no matter how good they are the first time, become clichés by the fifth.

Practically speaking, there’s a lot you can do. The key thing to remember is that you’re not tired of writing—you’re tired of some structural aspect of your writing. Perhaps it’s the style of your narrators across stories, which seem to flow together into one blob. Perhaps your plots have a formulaic stench to them, ending with epiphanies, morals, or twists you’re tired of dishing out. Or perhaps you’re feeling bogged down by the requirements of stories themselves: having to create settings, characters, and plots when you want to reach some pinnacle of experience earlier.

Do an honest inventory of your work up until this point and find out what you keep repeating to yourself. It may well be that your previous work was exactly what you once aimed for. But times have changed, and so have you. I’m not saying that you have to throw away everything you’ve accomplished up until now, but it’s helped me to admit when it’s time to break things down and begin again.

Ask yourself where in your writing you feel like an expert and where you clutch with the tightest grip and try the opposite. I’ve found prompts to be useful for this, so here are a few.

If you’re a literary writer, write a sci-fi mystery. If you’re verbose, try a story in under a thousand words. A sparse poet? Give a go to a sixty-line poem in one continuous sentence. An oblique, abstract writer? Rewrite one of your pieces in the simplest, most direct language you can muster—no hiding! A fan of quiet, ambiguous endings? End a story with an outrageous, definitive outcome you would never, in your old practice, dare to write. Immersed in the serious and intellectual? I dare you to write a bubbly, funny children’s story.

All you need to remember is that your writing can be anything. Pay attention more to all that isn’t language, and soon you’ll find these prompts and nudges everywhere. Give yourself the luxury of rabbit holes and looking glasses, dive deep into your alternate lives and careers. Whatever you do, free yourself from any singular idea of art. Let yourself open from within. Be excited for what’s to come through.

‘What Are Friendships to a Writer’s Life?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I feel quite embarrassed writing this letter. My query makes me feel like a teenager again: desperate, awkward, self-conscious. But the openness and honesty that you’ve so generously granted us through this column help me to feel able to tug at this question that has bothered and terrified me for years now: how do I make more writer friends?

These days, people are always talking about how important ~community~ is to the practice of writing. I wholeheartedly agree! Especially as I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with the literary industry and the prestige economy, I’ve become convinced that the primary factors that give writing purpose are the relationships of care that it makes possible.

That said, almost none of my close friends are writers. I used to have a poetry community through the structure of college, but most of those relationships haven’t survived past graduation. The few close friends that I still have from those circles no longer write much or at all. As a result, I’ve been feeling deeply lonely in my writing practice. Without community and friendship to ground myself in, I feel my writing is adrift and purposeless, and like I might as well not write at all.

I’ve tried workshops, events, social media, but I’ve yet to find much success through those routes. They often feel steeped in a dynamic of “networking” that I don’t know how to navigate. Even spaces that claim a commitment to community can feel exclusive, like I’m in high school again. For me, thinking about writing & friendship is directly tied to my desire to build spaces for writing that exist outside of the capitalist logics and machinery that produce what we call “literature”—to instead connect with others not just as writers sharing/discussing our work, but as people navigating this brutal world together. I just don’t know how/where to find this. And yet, it feels like other writers I meet have already found close-knit writing communities for themselves—which then leads me to wonder if perhaps I just lack the social skills necessary to build the friendships I seek…

Am I wayyy overthinking this? What do you see as the place of friendships in the life of a writer? Is it really as crucial to being a “good” writer as I feel it is?

Thank you so much for spending time with these questions.

With gratitude,
Socially Anxious Poet

Dear SAP,

The word “community” is a bit jumbled in such a tight-knit profession. Is it drinks with a friend or your next editor? Someone you happened to take a workshop with or the next New York Times bestselling author? One never knows. But you do know already—you know that you don’t care much for the nepotism or networking. I think you’re right about that. That leaves us, though, with artistic friendships, and whether there’s any point in get twisted up over them.

What I hear most from you, SAP, is that you’re artistically lonely. Let me be more specific here. I’m going to assume that you wouldn’t take any person who puts words on the page as a writing friend. What I hear most from your letter is that you want to be understood—and understood artistically. As in, this is neither the best friend who knows the ins-and-outs of your romantic life but has no idea about your writing, nor is it simply anyone who knows what “allusion” or “sibilance” mean—you want to be friends with other writers who are good readers for you. They’ve got an inkling of what you’re up to or they’re open, able, and willing to try.

The problem-solver in you might be saying Okay, you’re lonely? Time to get some friends! and then you end up writing the letter that you’ve sent me. It’s not so easy. Partly because of the nepotism and networking. But also because it’s just so hard to find good friends and keep them, period. And, on top of that, what you want from a writing community is incredibly specific, as specific as you are a person. And the loneliness you speak of can go even deeper than all this. The loneliness can also be about your voice—about how and why you speak.

I say this because you write in your letter that you feel “adrift and purposeless, and like [you] might as well not write at all.” You guess this is about the dissolution of your previous writing community or maybe (you fear) your lackluster social skills. All of these, combined, remind me of a kind of isolating social situation you may find familiar.

Imagine joining a distant acquaintance’s party. The conversation groups have been established. Your one familiar face, the host, can’t be found in the crowd. You don’t know anyone here, so you stall and grab a beer, but this only takes up so much time. Soon, you’re standing at the edge of one group and waiting awkwardly for someone to talk to you. You may try to respond to something you overhear but get ignored or a brief stare from the group. The conversations around you don’t concern you. It seems that this will continue. You are an extra at best, a pariah at worst.

I can’t say why you became a writer, SAP, but I can speak more to why I did. Thanks to racism, transphobia, and capitalism, I’m frequently seen as a piece of a person. There are very few places where I’m seen as an integrated self rather than a collection of the pieces I hold. Not knowing you, SAP, you’ll have to answer these questions for yourself: what do others see when they see you? Have you ever felt wanted for all of you?

I’ve lived through iterations of that party more than once. It would happen when I was at home with my family, while I was hiding my sexuality; it would happen at the few parties I went to in high school, where most of my peers were white; it would happen at writer dinners where the one person I knew was across the table, and no one else knew who I was. I have been ignored, underestimated, and misunderstood. I have been judged for what I look like; I have been dismissed for who I am. I either couldn’t give what I had or was treated as having nothing to give.

Why does anyone go to a party? For me, it’s the off-chance of meeting someone new, of letting chance into my social life. It’s when you show up and no one approaches you, over and over, that it starts to get to you. In artistic loneliness, it seems like no one else is trying to get at what you want to say; it may seem as though you’re alone in a corner no one else dares to approach. You might get angry and start to ask yourself why you came to the party at all.

Then the doubt creeps in. Perhaps it isn’t them. Perhaps it’s you, after all. Something’s missing—social skills, sure, or talent? A sense of “real” art? Something that prevents you from being enticing, desired, or wanted. You can’t put your finger on it. The net reality is the same: you came alone and you leave alone. But something is quashed in the process—something precious and important: belonging.

Belonging is not just some high school drama. One hopes to belong because it is an affirmation of life—space for your growth, resources to flourish—it’s a promise that there’s a place for you. To be counted among others only adds to your life. Belonging is shared, connected life. It can carry you out of death. Without belonging, you might feel no difference between yourself and the wallpaper behind you. Without a destination, you might not have a reason to leap.

When I wish for a true friend, I wish for someone who will look me in the eye and ask about who I am and why I am here. I wish for someone who values the honesty of those answers as much as the space needed to summon them. I wish for someone who will wait up for me and who will let me know what happened up ahead; someone whose judgment I trust enough when they say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘maybe.’ Someone who values the same in kind. Someone who values these things even more when they come from me. Friendship is mutually belonging to someone else, not in possession but inclusion. As in, a recognition of life that passes between two consciousnesses. A sharing of a path together—and maybe some direction on the right turns.

I wonder if it is more painful to be shut out of literary communities because of the kinds of people who become readers. I’m thinking, in particular, of why young me became a reader. I became a reader because I had a lot to give that nobody asked for. Out of my sorrow came a deep desire to understand. That perhaps if I could see others better, I could teach them to see me. To read another person’s book, to spend time with another’s voice, was a way I could say yes! I am here and eager to listen! even when no one was coming to talk to me. Having a book in my lap was almost—almost—like having a friend, or perhaps it was even better, because the book could not tell me I was not like them. The book received me with open pages. It existed to help me experience something. I, as the reader, was always the destination.

So, what do I suggest for you? Your loneliness gives you an incredible insight—by seeing yourself, you can see others who feel alone in the same way. Build for yourself what you’ve been missing. By publishing books or starting generative writing groups, yes. But also gatherings with no purpose but enjoyment: picnics over the bay and frosty evenings with some wine. What are the writing friendships you dream of in this life? A risk must be taken, an action is needed—you require something different in this world, like the first impulse you had when you started writing. You want something that you can’t find. You need something you must make yourself.

It will take even longer to get to your artistic friends—they are few and far between across time and languages, but you belong with them in a constellation much larger than lifetimes. It’s the kind of meeting you get in front of a painting, alone but together with someone else’s life. In those moments, you aren’t alone. You can bring the painting inside of you—something of those brush strokes, something of the hand required, the vision needed. You can feel the movement of the artist. Their impression in the world. As in, that living hand that moves the bowl away; that foot that kicks the spring grass. And then there’s you, asking if you will do this too. That is making, isn’t it? Like the wind that flaps the laundry. Like the sun melting the snow.

To become a writer is to realize you don’t have to wait to be addressed. Your purpose becomes to speak, not to wait to be spoken to. When you speak, everyone who’s ever spoken to you collides and echoes out of you. When you make your art, you repeat a life-giving act, and your movements, too, will live on and echo, one day, in someone else.

That energy, that movement—that is the friendship we are a part of. And the artist’s gaze is the human frame—the witnessing of all life. All the artists you have ever known, all the writers you have ever read, we are watching it with you. We are alone, we are together. An eternal constellation in this great expanse.

‘What Does Better Writing Feedback Look Like?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’d love your thoughts on the best way to give thoughtful, smart feedback to fellow writers who you may be in formal writing groups with (or informal ones). And also, how to lead feedback sessions that are generative, illuminating and challenging (in the best way possible). I guess, I’d also like to know in what ways people express feedback on your work is most productive for you. As a BIPOC writer, I’ve been on the receiving end of feedback that I felt was harmful, lazy, and, in one specific case, included an ad hominem attack that the instructor did nothing about. I am now leading a fellowship program with diverse writers of varying ages, genres, race/ethnicity, and gender identities (12 people in all). I do not want to replicate the patterns of harm that I have been on the receiving end of when engaging with the work of others. Do you have any tips, resources or lived experiences that could shed light on this issue? Thank you so very much!

Warmly,
A Better Way to Give Feedback

Dear BWGF,

First of all, I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve been on the receiving end of an ad hominem attack in a workshop setting, and I’m even more dismayed to hear that your instructor did nothing while it was happening. There is so much care that is needed in the line of teaching. For what it’s worth, it’s good that you have a basis of personal experience from which you know what’s a stake as you been crafting this program.

As you and I know, you wrote this letter to me some years ago, so your journey with this fellowship program is probably well underway (perhaps you have more to tell about the topic now—if so, I’d love to hear from you again). I think I received it at around the same time I had just written about giving feedback, MFA programs , and reading each other better , but the intervening years have given me more teaching experiences and, therefore, more insight that I can perhaps now offer to you.

I have loved workshops, rejected them, and come back to them as both a practitioner and a teacher. My current stance is that there’s a time and place for a well-structured workshop, but it must be well-structured, and it must be the right time and place. In particular, workshops can be wonderful spaces of experimentation, whether it’s for beginning writers or seasoned ones looking to “begin again.”

One of my favorite workshop experiences was with the poet Farnoosh Fathi on play, who had us meditate together on the relationship between prayer and play in the first class. What works about this prompt? It was specific, was no one’s darling project, and the group was a hodgepodge of people. The multiple perspectives turned into a rich discussion and contemplation of the other prompts we would do for the rest of the class. The thinking we were doing was loose but self-contained within the workshop’s purpose. The class worked together toward a common learning goal to explore this topic from week-to-week. The feedback we gave each other was not extensive but was encouraging for whatever one might do with the work after that.

I’ve yet to find a full-proof workshop structure that doesn’t somehow have life leak in—and by that I mean all the positive side-tracks, the uglier attacks, or the unconscious microaggressions that deaden the classroom as they do life. However, as I’ve said, a good workshop is a well-structured one, and the structure will at least set up expectations, hope, and a community contract that you, as participant but especially as instructor, are promising to abide by.

What do I mean by this? I mean that if you want feedback that is generative, illuminating, and challenging, you must ask for it repeatedly. When you’re the instructor, you can even bake those asks into your critique process, first by looking at other models (such as Liz Lerman’s critical response process or Felicia Rose Chavez’s flipped author-as-moderator workshop), trying them, refining with your group as you go along, and for yourself as you teach more.

My own protocol that I variously adjust depending on the class that I’m teaching is to describe (the work neutrally), inquire (specifically to gain more insight about the author’s intent), and suggest (radical revisions or prompts based on the author’s questions or needs). I don’t do line edits.

What you ask for in the classroom may not come to fruition, but asking for it will make it more likely to happen nonetheless. Setting a strong protocol can also act as a safety net from those more harmful possibilities of the workshop model. Having the author as the moderator of a discussion of their work rather than a passive listener, for example, could at least bestow permission to deter long-winded digressions that are not helpful to them, and even cut off more harmful comments when they occur. For writers new to workshops, a good structure can also have the two-fold benefit of teaching them a model of giving constructive feedback before they make one up on their own (because they will).

The kind and intensity of feedback you’d offer in a novel-writing group on a deadline will be very different than a group experimenting with poems after the sounds of bird calls. Moreover, the workshop is only one model of giving feedback. There’s also the model of writing letters to each other, one-on-one tutorials with the instructor, or leaving group feedback on a shared piece. However you design it, do design it, and ask yourself these questions of the structure: what situations am I trying to encourage? To prevent? What is this group accountable to? What is this group trying to explore?

I would be remiss not to speak to you directly in this letter, BWGF, about why we instructors ask these questions in the first place. You see, I can hear how much you care for your students in this letter, and I share that care, that want to do better by them, in my own teaching practice. But I have found—and perhaps you do too—that I often give away the things I myself need.

My greatest fear as a teacher is to replicate my own worst experiences as a student. I’ve had teachers who put no effort into challenging us, hostile classmates, and instructors who attacked students themselves. I am a critical person, and I was often critical of my teachers, too: I was angry at them for not preventing certain things or doing enough with others. I wanted my teachers to fail so that I could be the one who knew better; I wanted my teachers, too, to live up to unrealistic, grandiose ideals of comprehensive knowledge; I wanted my teachers to understand and validate me. The love I had given up on at home I redirected into the classroom.

It was this baggage that I brought with me when I transitioned into instructing—the anxious months prepping toward a expertise I would never achieve, working overtime to care for students’ fraught mental health, and the constant fear in the classroom that I would be found out as a fraud, unqualified and unworthy of being at the head of the table. I too asked these questions about the best ways to give feedback. I wanted a silver bullet that would prevent any mistakes—a recipe to save my students’ precious lives from the harm I myself had endured.

You may feel, as I did, the double pressure of being a BIPOC instructor—the tokenizing assumption that because you’re BIPOC, you automatically know better ways to conduct a classroom after having grown up more on the receiving end of that same systemic violence. You may fear, as I still do, the disappointment in your students’ eyes when—yes, when!—you make a mistake on that end. This striving for perfection, too, is a shard of white supremacy. Do not let it lodge in you, despite the promises of power it makes.

It is important to improve as a teacher. But it is also important to acknowledge that what you have to bring is enough, and that your learning will always be a part of this process, whether or not your students, your administration, or your colleagues agree. You cannot prevent the mines of the world from getting in your path, but you can practice thinking and acting with your whole self when they show up.

I signed up for a class with the poet Tracie Morris several years ago. Ostensibly a workshop, it was also a master class in instructor presence. On those evenings in an East Village church classroom, people would sometimes arrive late. Morris, in the middle of lecture, would greet each of them with measured warmth and attention before continuing on with ease.

To this day, I cannot pinpoint what moved me so with her acknowledgements—perhaps it was the absolute calm with which she approached the space, her studious attention to people, always, before the material. It was as though her classroom was circumscribed with her consciousness, and that her students’ movements inside it would be seen, considered, and responded to with authenticity.

I strive to embody that same presence in the classes I teach, and the best I can tell you is that it comes from your genuine embodied presence in the classroom. Not as the perfect expert, the cool people-pleaser, or the idiosyncratic maverick, but an integrated person who happens to love art, too, and who has done it perhaps for a little while longer, or a little differently. I wish you every opportunity to feel that authenticity, and to enact it, too. Good luck.

‘Is an MFA Worth It?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Over and over I hear writers I trust and respect say that the MFA is a waste of money. And always (at least I cannot think of an exception), these writers have an MFA and are working as writers. Additionally, non-extensive research positions the MFA as a "gate-keeping" - you need it to get noticed, to get read, to get fellowships, to have opportunities, etc. and etc. and etc.

But beyond that, surely the MFA IS a way to work on our craft, no? And no matter what it costs, it is a cost that can be absorbed by student loans, which is not the case for the various (many amazing) writing workshops offered via other methods. And, perhaps even more than the craft aspect - or certainly intimately connected to it - is the ability to be part of an ongoing group/cohort/community - where you have constant access to feedback, response, workshopping, and editing...along with the ability to revise and regroup.

I have more student loan debt than a person should be allowed to have (see everything you've written re: classism )...which leaves me with the "so what's some more?"

I've had a shit couple of years and am in a constant struggle to literally eat and pay bills. And every time I take a writing workshop, I feel a longing deep in my soul to apply for an MFA so I can do that All. The. Time. Besides, graduate student loans usually include some money to live on...relieving some of that pressure as well.

Obviously having missed the regular cycle, I'm now 99% sure I'm going to apply to a few low-residency programs. Maybe I'm looking for your validation? Maybe I'm just looking for your reaction to my various thoughts and perspectives.

Sincerely,
Dreaming-of-a-Writing-Community

Dear DWC,

First off, these past few years you’ve had sound really tough, both financially and emotionally. I’m glad you’ve gotten a chance to take some workshops and, as you’ve said, to discover that deep longing you feel for writing all the time.

I can’t, of course, give you any financial advice, not being an adviser or privy to your real situation. It also seems that you’ve already decided to apply to some programs, given the end of your letter. I've also offered thoughts about getting an MFA in the past. But your letter struck me, still, and I wanted to speak to you about your reasons for applying and your opinions, in hopes this letter will be useful to you and someone else.

Writing, for me, brings the world closer at hand, but in a way that allows for me to say what it is and what I want it to be. There’s an incredible release that happens in the imaginative act, during which one’s choices aren’t limited by circumstances. Rather than accepting a lesser option when one would prefer another, one can receive whatever one wants, be whoever one wants, in the realm of the imagination.

In other words, my writing has always reminded me that I am alive, and can be, and my desire to do it all the time has been connected to my desire to live my life out on my own terms. Perhaps this resonates with your experience. Perhaps you want more opportunities to materially play out that gift of agency.

Now, it’s interesting to me that in the same sentence you speak of that deep longing, you cast the MFA as the intermediary step to that life of writing all the time. I say this because an MFA is a terminal program by design—if you’re lucky, immersive in all the best ways, but temporary all the same.

Perhaps you’ve already thought about this, and perhaps you’ve told yourself that even if it’s temporary, at least you will have this reprieve from the relentless struggle of your life. I know that you want this enough to take on more debt, debt that will never be paid back from the dearth of creative writing jobs on the other side.

But I also want to emphasize that the working writers you’ve talked to, the ones with the MFAs already, probably aren’t writing all the time, and they certainly aren’t making most of their money from it. It’s been humbling for me to learn in the past few years that despite outward achievements and even fame, the nitty-gritty of writing income is still precarious and unpredictable, and it’s best not to rely on it for a very long time.

Most writers nowadays who are considered “successful” have some sort of day job unrelated to their writing, a category in which I include teaching. Beyond money, you can have an MFA, the accolades, and even the tenured professor job, and that still wouldn’t mean anything in terms of whether or not you’re writing.

This is all to say that the writing life is not an all-or-nothing game. I don’t know the full picture of your past few years or your class history, but I do think scarcity can have a profound effect not only on fulfilling one’s basic needs but also on the attitude with which one thinks about every resource in one’s life. Scarcity creates a destabilizing see-saw between having and not-having. Every abundance that comes your way may feel like a fluke—so living well becomes about doing so when you can because the resources probably won’t be there for very long.

Has it been hard for you, DWC, to keep the things and people you want in your life? Perhaps, for you, it’s not just been food and bills, but also family, friends, and lovers. Perhaps you’ve had a harder time than you’ve even let on in your note to me. Perhaps your debt came from paying for your way through college when family couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t support you. Perhaps you’ve made your way alone, with no help, and survived.

I hope you can be proud of whatever you’ve accomplished, because debt’s not only financial. Debt is the material manifestation, as wrong as it is, of how you are not enough—it’s a reminder that you’re started at a deficit, and that no matter how much you’ve given, the weight of your burden is always bigger than the power you have to slough it off.

If a writing program seems a narrow door through which you might squeeze out of this cycle, with some careful planning, it’s not a bad idea, so long as you don’t equate an MFA with the writing life. It’s not, and you’ll probably be disappointed if you go into one with that expectation.

But where could an MFA fit into this vision of the writing life, if at all? At its best, an MFA can offer craft, community, and professional legitimacy as you desire in your letter. You will, at the very least, be able to teach at the college level. It can also relieve your financial burdens—the funding out there is real, if you are intentional about getting it—and it can provide a loose structure from which you can transition, as I did, from one version of your life to another.

I will offer three quick pieces of advice for the journey: do not take on more debt, go to a program that fits, and create the experience you want when you’re there.

Whatever you do, do not go into more debt to get an MFA. However, don’t self-reject just because there’s no clear messaging on whether a program has funding upfront. There are enough programs with enough funding out there that you have a decent shot of getting paid to study writing. This note applies to even low-residency programs, which did not seem to have funding in the years I was looking at them. Apply to the programs you sense are a good fit, and you may be surprised by a full scholarship or work-study funding.

To ascertain program fit, ask yourself where you feel “stuck” in your practice right now. Have you maxed out on writing workshops? Don’t go to a studio program that emphasizes workshopping—you may be better off in a program that features a critical track, or the one-on-one attention that many low-residency models are built on. Read the work of the faculty on staff to see if there are any affinities, but also allow yourself to be surprised by who might read your work in the ways you need. It’s better to choose mentors who are kind but honest than mentors who promise to make you as great as they are. Do you want to experiment with other genres or deep-dive into your own? You may prefer programs that give their students genre flexibility in their classes.

For better or for worse, an MFA program is only as good as the people and the experiences you are open to while you are there. Ask yourself carefully about what you want from the program and then set out to make it happen. Ask your peers out to lunch, join as an editor at the program magazine, and take conference and fellowship opportunities as they come along.

If you’re serious about this dream of writing all the time, an MFA would just be a pit-stop on the way to getting that accomplished. It’s not a panacea and, in the wrong program, may actually hinder your creativity and voice and create specters of competition in your imagination rather than give you a community. Writing is not a noble goal, but a humble truth about who you are. And if you’re prepared to aim for it and act for it, in that doing so would be acting for the life you wish to have, I wholly support whatever way you might want to achieve it. Good luck.

‘How Do I Let a Draft be a Draft?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you for The Reading, and thank you to all of the writers asking questions I didn’t know I was carrying myself. This has been a really treasured component of my never-ending writing education, and it’s great to be here with you all.

I’m a poet, mostly, but sometime last winter I decided to start writing a novel. I love fiction and I help edit books in my day job. In many ways, it really just felt like time to take my idea and run with it, to try to sustain my creative practice with a real, full-length draft. To see if I could actually do it!

I’m around halfway through, and it’s been a powerful learning experience already. That said, I struggle to “let go” and just fall into the experience of writing. I worry I’m not following my notes/research, I worry about continuity and all kinds of nitpicky things, I worry about leaving each sentence shiny and lovely and getting stuck when it’s time to move to the next one. Intellectually, I know I’m probably capable of fixing and improving the manuscript further down the road—my editing pays the bills. How to let go and let a draft be a draft and trust my “future self” for a revision one day?

Sincerely,
Present Self

Dear PS,

Thank you for your letter. Perhaps this letter reaches you a year too late—or perhaps it will still be of some help, whatever writing you are doing now.

Sometimes it is difficult to write if you’ve being harsh on yourself, in which case it may help to fail on purpose . It’s also possible that your editing brain is just still on when you’re working on the novel. You know what you would say to one of your authors—so why would you let it slide when you’re working on something for yourself?

Unfortunately, you already know the outcome when an editor hovers over your writing shoulder: even if you’re not being harsh with yourself, there’s a perfectionist who can’t let go of anything you say without needlessly poring over every sentence, and as a result, you can’t let go. You say as much in your letter.

From even your casual mention of notes and research, my guess is that you’ve already done a lot of work before even starting to write this novel. You may have written outlines and character sketches; you may have traveled out of your way, in books and in the world, to get the feel of your vision just right.

My advice that follows assumes that your outline is actually pretty solid. I’m assuming that when you go back to your notes, you’re not wholly cutting major characters or introducing significant new tensions into the plot. I’m assuming that for the most part, you know the story from every major character’s point of view, you know how the whole thing will end, and you’re shifting minor details and rewriting your plans anyway.

Since you started from the vantage point of a poet, let’s dwell a bit on the differences of between poems and novels. For one, you have a short-form piece and a long-form piece. You may write a poem that is one page, in one person’s voice, and it would be done within the day, if not a fortnight. The magnitude of time is not the same for a novel.

Novels are typically hundreds of pages. They often involve not just one character, but several, all of whom are required to dance in tension through connections and disconnections. A plan is required for each of these pieces to be held together, for their arrangement to cohere into a larger whole. What about each these character’s lives, up until your book, makes their combination not a situation, but a story? What about this story makes you want to write it, and how will you?

Just to begin your novel, you will have had to think through these questions. It seems almost counterintuitive, then, after all that work, that you wouldn’t be able to just settle down and write it. It may pain you, actually, that any drop of your previous efforts may have been for naught. But I’ll hazard a guess that your block is coming from something deeper than this sunk-cost attachment to your outline.

Since you do not specify, I find myself imagining how this might play out. Perhaps while you’re writing, you write a sentence that you find terrible. You return to your notes to comfort yourself with the larger, masterful scheme you’ve laid out. Yet, now doubt creeps in. If the plan was so masterful, then why can’t you write it? So you leave your notebook, take the day off, and tackle notes and research again. This goes on for quite some time until you have sufficiently exhausted yourself from replanning. You begin to write again, and the same thing plays out.

There is something comforting about planning a Big Thing. How wonderful that a 300-page tome may be condensed into a constellated paragraph, where every chapter might be summarized and the whole can be seen from above. In some ways, it seems even more straightforward than waiting for a poem to appear and the hasty chase for it once it does. Yet, this may be wishful thinking about the novel. Perhaps a hope that if you can write an outline, especially a detailed one where everything from the period research to each character’s birthmark has been set, then maybe the novel can be automatic, almost like an assembly line.

But when the sentences don’t immediately come out right or your set-up doesn’t yield the tension you need, the solution is not to double-down on scaffolding. Although the novel form and its planning stages may suggest that you can control it, my guess is that the opposite is true. If your anxieties are preventing you from continuing to write, then you’re to practice loosening your grip rather than tightening it.

Plans are all about potential . What will you put down, when it comes down to it? Everyone talks about the shitty first draft, that horrible blob that gives you the true bird’s eye view and not just the scribblings, but there’s something to it. In every shitty first draft, you will learn two things: what you are capable of writing on initial dash and, more importantly, what you actually want to write.

To write a shitty first draft, you must throw out any idea that you have for quality. “Quality” is qualitative. It comes from other people’s ideas of good art, combined into the sensibility that is the editor on your shoulder. And once you get rid of your attachment to quality, you’ll be able to hear the muse in your ear—the voice within only you can make real.

Holding fast to one’s notes is an attachment to quality—the work must be accurate, consistent, continuous, etc. Yet, what would happen if you didn’t stick with your outline? If you weren’t accurate or consistent with those historic details, with your past self’s dictations? You may respond that the whole story would fall apart. You may protest that you would have to start all over, with new characters and new situations. You may fear that you’d never reach the end. But the way you’re going, you wouldn’t reach the end anyway. Your outcome wouldn’t actually change.

Nothing will happen if your write bad sentences. No one will hunt you down and you will not be punished. In fact, dawdling and giving yourself the leisurely pace of running into dead-ends, will only give you a better idea of why this path forward instead of that path. Or, you stand to be pleasantly surprised by the possibilities that the new experiment affords you.

I write these letters on two documents—one that holds the “cuttings” and the other that holds the current draft. Quite often, in the past, I’ve gotten over halfway through but have ended up stuck, unsure about where to go on next. It’s those times, more often than not, that I realize I’ve sidetracked, and then those seven-hundred or so words will get chucked into the cuttings document and I write a new letter much more easily to the end. If I need to, I can always retrieve them (but I usually don’t).

To this end, I want to offer you some practical advice to invite you outside the scaffolding. The first being that you should find a way to write without deleting anything. Backspace is the liberated first draft’s enemy. The easiest way to do this would be to write your novel by hand rather than on a word processor. Designate a special notebook and write through your scenes.

If you can’t write by hand for any reason, do the same thing but with a word processor. To make it difficult for you to go back and rewrite everything from the beginning, take your scenes one at a time, but do so out of chronological order.

Pace yourself, too. Don’t write everything at once if you can help it. Give yourself an achievable daily goal, like a scene, three pages a day, or some smaller unit you know would be possible for you. Forgive yourself on days you can’t get to writing. Spacing out the work over time will help you stay energized in the writing and allow time to intuit decisions that can be addressed the next day.

The goal is not to rush through the first draft, but to accumulate as much as possible, however long it takes. By the time you get to typing up the notebook, you’ll have more than you need to choose from, and it’ll be easy to cut the rest.

You are the only one who can say what your fears are before asking how you want to face them. But sometimes you need to give yourself room to write whatever you want, however you want to write it, in order for the real story to show up. The throat-clearings, the dead-ends, and even overwritten characters leave their traces on your final draft. They are stepping stones for that view from the river; they are old runes hidden in a dead end.

The particular peculiars of a good work come from the fact that it’s a palimpsest of plans and impulses. Any art that’s worth making has a morass of uncertainty that must be waded through in order for the work to be complete. You have no choice but to dive into uncertainties. But you can choose between welcoming it and fearing it, and let the work, and you, grow beyond anything you could have ever planned.

‘Why Do You Write?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Yanyi,

Why did you choose to become a writer? And why do you think people should write?

Warmly,
R.

Dear R,

I am a writer because I must write. Because I must write, it has saved my life at least twice. As I struggled to find the right path balancing my parents’ expectations and my freedom to live as a queer and trans person , understanding that living a double life would stop me from writing helped me make my decision. While being emotionally abused in my first relationship, the demand from my ex that I stop publishing was the moment I finally woke up to how they were really treating me.

How do I know that I must write and not something else? For most of my life, I’ve struggled with setting boundaries, voicing what I do and do not want, and, painfully, standing up for myself when I have faced some kind of violence, especially from loved ones.

Sometimes not knowing who you are is worse than knowing who you are and not liking it. For better and for worse, my “I” has always been blurry, open to change when it is needed but also open to manipulation.

In the worst moments of my life, I would have done anything, admitted to anything, for a given violence to stop and for my care to be possible again. What use is a self to an eight-year-old girl? What use is a self to a 23-year-old woman, at that, who had just disavowed an otherwise secure family for a nebulous queerness, whose gulf of loneliness was so vast with gestures of intimacy she did not receive and could not respond to and so fortified by societal prejudices both within and without her? I didn’t want a self. I wanted to be loved.

And yet, even in the beginning, there was also the library. It was my first definite joy in a new town. For as many times we moved before I was eight, my mother would track down the local library and lead me to a carpeted and musty children’s section the way other mothers might take their children to Disneyland. Even if, later on, there would be many things she would not understand about me, she knew to take me to the library. It was how I know she was trying to love me.

When I was younger, being a reader lent me an identity that had nothing to do with my immediate discords at home and in school. Literature was a place where I could rest, rather than defend, a self. It was a place where I could have one.

I must write because otherwise I would lose track of who I am. I must write because, when I had no one to tell my story to, putting my words down on the page gave me the gift of a future listener; of turning my prodigious listening to myself; of telling my own story, on my own terms, and the gift of choosing what to do after that.

My writing is the physical manifestation of the self that I have—as in having—to defend. It is my self-possession. Not because the self is property but because the self is the spring with which I leap into my life. It determines the directions I venture into. It guides how I progress through this time.

There is a part of me ashamed of how I need words to recognize myself, but then another in awe of how I knew, so young, to transfer my worth to a lifeboat, so that even if the ship were to meet its wreck, some seed of who I was lived on, some ghost to haunt me back to self-possession, even if I myself did not believe in it.

For my whole life, and even now, I have been ashamed of not only saying what I wanted but also of merely wanting. When, as a child, I did not have the tools to confront that shame and fear of punishment for mere existence, books gave me choice; reading allowed me preferences. For most of my childhood, I learned to recognize the feeling of freedom in an infinity room of authors and their characters speaking for themselves and, for as long as I needed it, me.

It is important to know that feeling. For even if you do not know freedom’s name, when you are awakened to it, you learn, in sinew and bone, that your body is capable of different feelings, deeper configurations, than those you regularly have.

It is no wonder that I wrote very few poems during those years I lived against my grain, agreeing to each portrait I was painted as, correcting my movements, adjusting my personality, believing I was managing someone else’s moods and needs by changing myself when the truth was that they were managing me.

I know I have abandoned myself in the name of love. I know now that those times were not love. And I know that they weren’t because I stopped writing.

For those who rely on force and control, your art is dangerous. To explore the range of your sentience is to remember that there is something else possible in your life. Something beyond what you are being told, because you have something to tell yourself. Something beyond the world you know, because you have glimpsed, out of the corner of your eye, another world that you can feel.

It seems to me this sentience is all we have. Wake up! it tells me, when I am still and barely breathing, for weeks or years in the same apartment, or in the same cycles of abuse, too amenable to giving up, too easy to overwhelm. When I write, I teach myself what I am still fighting for. It need not be in a war.

In fact, the easiest way to lose your self in your life is little by little, in the everyday yes you no longer feel for, in the certainty that those monsters in your shadows are still out to get you. And isn’t that the point of the original violence? It amazes me, after years of not speaking to my abusers, how loudly their favorite accusations still play in my mind. Stories so well-wrought they don’t even have to be told.

You will never be free from what you hear. But you can be free in your writing, where you say something back.

‘Am I Just Too Lazy to Be a Writer?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’ve been working on a project for years now. It’s big and ambitious for me, someone who writes poetry and short creative nonfiction, and has never really worked on a Project. With much of my writing, I made it from start to finish quickly, a kind of jauntiness I needed to be able to write. (Which, I have my own shame about because I know how much revision is a part of writing. But I told myself that those writings were just for me, so I could do whatever I wanted, and it’s how I’ve been able to find joy and freedom in my writing.) This one, though, the Project, was different because it had many moving parts. I could not do it in one sitting.

From the beginning, I found reasons to put it off -- I started a new job, namely, and didn’t have as much time. Fortunately, in the last year and a half, I’ve been able to make more progress on it than I have in the four years since I began. A friend acted as a “project therapist,” holding me accountable and meeting with me to talk about the plan for the book. I hired a writer to read what I had written so far and chat with me about it as a way to give myself deadlines and get myself writing. Both of these things helped enormously, until they didn’t.

So I’m at a standstill again. It’s crazy to me because I want to write this book. I think about what my letter must sound like and part of me fears you’ll say, it sounds like deep down you don’t want to work on this project. But that’s not true. It’s a book about a group of people in my life whom I deeply care about, a tribute to them. And I love the project for that reason, love where writing it has taken me so far, how it’s pushed me to new places, but for some reason, I find it so hard to sit down and write, especially without some kind of deadline. There’s always something easier and more comforting to be doing. I’ve been consumed with my day job. But I do have time. I could make the time. And then I go back to one of my constant writing fears, which is, am I just too lazy to be a writer?

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

Yours,
A Slow Mover

Dear ASM,

The answer to your question of laziness is, of course, no. There are concrete details: you work a full-time job, something like 40 hours a week, if you’re lucky, though it would not surprise me, depending on the work culture of where you are, that it is more. In contrast, I consider myself a full-time writer, but I work anywhere between 20-30 hours a week, which feels more than enough. You’ve also enlisted help from others, both in your friend and this hired consultant, for extra pushes for this project.

But now, as you say, things are at a standstill again. You could, perhaps, call on friends again, but it seems the heart of your letter is not about getting this project done—it’s about who you are, what you’re capable of, and whether you’ve got the mettle to be a writer in your own eyes.

Early in your letter, you say that revising is supposed to be part of the writing process, but that you enjoy writing in these jaunty spurts that may include little revision. It strikes me that you mention shame here, because your fear of being lazy, to me, doesn’t seem to have much to do with fear, as laziness can’t hurt you directly, but with shame.

The objective facts that refute shame, as concrete as they can be, have little sway in making it go away. You might use the boogeyman of laziness to get yourself to a deadline, and you might give yourself an extra kick by summoning a witness to be your overseer. But I suspect that your fear of laziness spreads to other parts of your life too. While the conscious point of invoking shame may be to get yourself to work harder, the unconscious point may be, well, to re-inscribe a story you heard over and over about yourself, a story that starts with you , climaxes at not enough , and ends with needs guidance—or else!

Shame doesn’t care about your writing. Not really, anyway. Shame, like a virus, just cares about becoming more powerful than you. It will latch on to anything—your job, your relationships, your self-image—so long as there’s a standard you can’t meet and an opportunity to call you out on it. Shame is about control. And, in my experience, shame has the voice of someone in your life who first taught you that you weren’t, and could never be, enough without them. So you come to rely on shame—the person or ideology doling it out—as the real authority in your life. Shame, on their side, is about control—on yours, about having it taken away.

You already know the difference between willingly and unwillingly giving up control. To willingly give up control is what you’ve been doing all along with your short creative nonfiction and poems. This, as it happens, is an artist’s trial: to free yourself from writing to expectations, including your own, which are also all the expectations you have ever been taught.

I know the jaunty writing you speak of. During the first years of my own serious practice, I wrote based on when the feeling would come. It was instantly pleasurable: the emotions I had and the words I thought would be in perfect harmony. I never went back to revise because I didn’t need to. Yes, being older now, I would likely change the poems I wrote then. But when I say I didn’t need to revise, it’s because I was writing to my best ability at that time: I didn’t know how to revise my work then, even if I had wanted to.

By limiting yourself to short works, a page here or there, you can write as the feeling passes over you, if you’ve got a pen in hand. But then something too big for a single moment comes along, something with too many parts to achieve in one go. Something so difficult, it is hard to get yourself back to it. So, because of it’s a method you know and it’s a method that’s worked, you immediately turn to shame, as it’s there to help you grow, no?

The thing about shame is that it’s used, often harmfully, to manipulate us into becoming more and more perfect. Shame is about a lack: something in you that isn’t quite there yet. For shame to be effective, we must always lack.

Maybe what I’m wondering, ASM, is whether shame can help you write. You are not lazy. You are a beginner ashamed that you’re not a master. You’re ashamed that you cannot do what you haven’t learned and haven’t been taught. “Lazy” is a shorthand—it contains no help, only a judgment and a directive to keep up. It blames you for the resources you don’t yet have.

Shame may get you a result, but it will never give you freedom, which is essential to art. While shame might bully you to the page and get you to a word count, it can’t give you the courage to write how you’d like; it doesn’t allow you to experiment, to take your time, or to ask yourself precisely what makes this project worth your labor and love. In other words, shame can’t get you the freedom you need in order to do this new kind of writing.

The jaunty writing protected me, as it probably protects you. It is a crucial threshold for an artist, actually, because if you’ve learned, for most of your life, that you will only make good work under duress, threat, or deadline, then you’ve got to start all over. You’ve got to learn, on your own terms, how you will make good work from love. Not love for this group of people, not love for art, even, but love for yourself.

A short poem is easy to manage. You can work with inspiration for five minutes or an afternoon. But a long piece with interconnected parts requires more than a moment’s notice. And the skills you’ve cultivated, that you’ve even mastered in short forms, are not enough for this new, capacious one. That doesn’t make you lazy. That doesn’t make you disposable. That puts you at a beginning, which is a beautiful place to be.

I’m not going to tell you that you don’t want to work on this project, which seems dear to your heart. But I will say that you won’t work on it as long as you don’t feel free in writing it. Sometimes writing itself is what you need to be freed from: it may be that you won’t write this project with the routine you imagine, staring at a sunset in perfect silence. It may happen in fits and starts. It may happen with whole drafts that go the wrong way until you learn what is wrong and why it is wrong.

Waiting and imagining what you will write are both parts of the process for a longer work. Writing can be taking notes and writing passages and scenes in short, fleeting moments. It can be whole projects in between, the ones that will give you more tools, more answers, that lead you back to this one. Don’t discount yourself from the pleasure of discovery, which requires mistakes and failures for epiphanies. It is the writer’s version of turning the page, of getting to the other side. Offer kindness where it has not been in kind; stay a while in the threshold so you can learn where you want to go.

‘How Do I Dream Bigger for My Writing?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for this newsletter. I’ve learned so much from reading it, including reassurance that I’m not alone in my writing struggles. I’m not sure I’ll be able to articulate my challenge, but here goes.

I have a day job in tech, which I do like. I derive satisfaction from doing my job well, interacting with colleagues, and helping customers. I also have a budding writing career, with some tangible successes, ie: good publications, kind reviews, respect from some writers I admire. Because I’ve made progress in both careers, one could say I’ve done a decent job at balancing. Thus far, I’ve been working hard at both, but of course most of my day is spent not-writing.

My problem is: I don’t know how to dream more, or dream bigger, for my writing career. I feel myself trying to keep my desires and expectations small, in order to shield myself from disappointment. At the same time, even just asking this demonstrates that I _do_ want more from my writing, right? But I have a fear of articulating or hoping for great things. I also feel guilty applying for residencies or fellowships when I make good money from my dayjob—even if, if I had those things, I would have more time to write.

I don’t want to pressure my art to provide for me materially. And I don’t know that my work is commercial enough to ever do that anyway…though I could, in a few years, save enough to take some time off. Sometimes, though, I think: Why not now? What if I might be good enough to live a life that’s mostly words? What if I _could_ write a book that could provide for me that way, or open those doors? What would it be like to not give myself another option? —and then I immediately shut that thinking down, because it’s scary to contemplate.

I find myself envying people who say they’re only good at writing, because then their path seems clearer. I know I’m lucky to have two careers. But the split life IS challenging, and I’m tired of keeping my dreams for my writing small, and of feeling ashamed about asking in the first place.

Sincerely,
Afraid to Dream

California

Dear AOD,

Thank you for reading and for writing this letter. I’ve previously written on my own process of leaving my last tech job, so I’ll leave the practicalities there. Today, instead, I’ll focus on your question of heart: you have a stable day job that’s balanced with a writing career, but you get this inkling that you’re cutting yourself short. In those moments, you give yourself a bit of room to dream about it, but you immediately—yup—cut yourself short because of a “fear of…hoping for great things.”

So, through a tiny example in your own letter, I would say yes, you are in your own way, as you’ve deduced already. But where you’re cutting yourself short is just as important to know as whether you’re doing it at all. Why, AOD, is it so horrible to hope for great things?

I think there’s a clue, again, in your letter. While you’re figuring out the right step to take, your day job arrangement remains the same. Yet, when you consider taking steps to give yourself more in the same circumstances, like going to a residency or getting a fellowship, you tell yourself that you don’t deserve it because of those circumstances —you have money while others don’t, and it would be inappropriate for you take up resources in light of that.

Perhaps residencies and fellowships, in your mind, are for real artists who you see as being rich in time but not in money. Every time you imagine yourself going to a residency, you also imagine these “real” artists who need it more than you do, from whom you are stealing a livelihood. Perhaps you believe your desires take away from someone else.

That’s the tricky thing about desires, right? To make them real, they take up space. They require action and follow-through in the world. You must act on behalf of your desires to reap the reward of making them real, but to make them visible in the world is also to make yourself vulnerable: in the case of a residency, to be shamed for taking a spot from someone who needs it more.

There’s some grief here, too. To acknowledge your dreams would be acknowledge that you are not satisfied, that you have not felt joy, and that perhaps you have cut yourself short so many times that you have lost your sense of how to ever find that person again.

It’s possible someone taught you, long ago, that not only were your desires inconveniences, but your basic needs were too. It’s possible that you were also taught that your desires were not to be trusted—that they made you naïve, and you were better off giving them up for a “greater good.”

Have you ever made a decision based not on what was true for you, but that seemed to be for the greater good? Perhaps you’ve skipped lunch in order to finish that important project for your boss. Perhaps you’ve stayed quiet while roiling with discomfort, physical or psychological. Perhaps, sometimes, you didn’t even get to make decisions: you’ve been trapped, more times than not, in situations you didn’t have the power to leave. And so you had to make it bearable, in whatever way necessary. You’ve survived while suffering, even thrived sometimes while doing it. But there was always something else that had to be done—a greater good, always, than you.

Greater goods come in many flavors. There’s the greater good of continuing the family legacy; the greater good of global citizenship; the greater good of being safe instead of wrong; the greater good of keeping the group’s peaceful dynamic; the greater good for an imaginary exotic or decrepit person, not you, never you, who deserved your care before it could ever get to you.

If there’s a greater good, then there’s a lesser good. Always second choice, always out of the way, always ignored until absolutely necessary. If there’s a greater good, then to pick the lesser good is at least shameful and foolish—at most, it is wicked and dangerous.

If this is familiar to you, if you treat yourself as a lesser good, then yes, you might have trouble dreaming bigger for your writing, because care for your writing is care for you. If you’ve spent your entire life deferring to greater goods, to causes more worthy than your own, then you’re years, maybe even decades, out of practice in answering to your desires, let alone knowing the right time to act on them.

Many of us, in one shape or another, are taught to enact the exact opposite. After a few years of exclamations about our cute imaginations, we’re taught to behave and be realistic; to tamp our dreams down rather than live them out. One might go from imagining fantastical epics with stuffed animals to filling out math drills, sitting still in class, and smiling when told, one docile body after another.

But dreaming carries on, albeit in a strained fashion. A trapped child, without a car or license, can get away in a book, or in a few moments of looking out the window. Dreaming becomes a vehicle of not being in this present, an optimism to palliate an ongoing unbearable. But that dreaming can become a compulsion, morphing from a child’s only escape into an adult’s gilded cage.

Because unlike children, adults can take action to make a difference in our lives. Dreaming may be easier than taking chances in life, but it’s an illusion of movement at best. So it’s not about dreaming bigger—it’s about dreaming and acting for what is right for you; it is about being present with yourself.

On being present, I offer Audre Lorde speaking in “Uses of the Erotic”, where she describes the erotic’s purpose as the “open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”

You can’t dream bigger by only imagining it. A dream cannot be touched or tasted. But the fuel for dreams, like dreams in sleep, come from the experiences we live. You have to free yourself to receive them.

Perhaps your itch to take off from your day job comes from the trickle you’ve allowed yourself from your modest success up until this point. With just these experiences, you’re teetering on the edge of your life and can feel the change blowing in the wind. What changes would you make if you acted on more? While I don’t know what the right timeline is for you, I do think you’ll know the more you practice living on your own behalf.

That is, you don’t have to start big at all. Don’t think in months or years—just start with today. What is one small thing you want for yourself that isn’t for anyone else? How will you take up space today? How will you try stretching your body into response? One small act can show you the space you could take up—it can show you the as-of-yet discovered reaches of your own heart.

You ask “What if I might be good enough to live a life that’s mostly words?” But you don’t know need to be good enough to be right where you are. You don’t need to be good enough to act for what you want. You’re good enough, AOD. You’re good enough to claim your life as your own. You don’t need anyone else’s permission.

‘Why Do I Want to Amount to Something So Much?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

As a senior in college, I am becoming increasingly anxious about life after graduation. All of the uncertainty! Even though we’ve been through so much uncertainty already, I still can’t manage it well. I am an English and Creative Writing (Poetry) major. I’m also a Virgo, so I’ve planned post-grad as much as I can. I’ve applied to the Fulbright Scholarship for an English Teaching Assistantship, but after a while, I decided that I should have back-up plans just in case I don’t get the Fulbright Scholarship. Maybe I’m a pessimist? Anyway, I’ve lined up nine grad schools’ MFA programs, and then my plan C is another program that allows me to teach English abroad. With all of these plans, the only thing I can do is wait. But I’ve been alternating between optimism and pessimism extremely frequently. My mood has also been swinging around a lot too. One day, I feel like I’m on top of the world, like I can do anything, and I believe that I’ll get into BOTH the Fulbright and grad school. The next day, I feel like shit, like I can’t do anything, like none of my poems are “good enough” to be submitted, and I’ll amount to nothing. Why is it that I want to amount to something so much? Anyways, please advise me gently...

Sincerely,
Karen Z.

Dear KZ,

You say that you can’t manage uncertainty well, but I want to acknowledge how you already are in some ways: it’s prudent of you to recognize the crapshoot chances of getting either a Fulbright or into an MFA program, so having a backup plan that would be more immediately available to you after graduation makes a lot of sense. On the practical end, your Virgo placement has helped you make the best of uncertainty in the material world.

The feeling that you “can’t manage it well,” of course, isn’t about your practical plans. As you speak of the seesaw between being a shoe-in and a nobody, it seems as though your emotional stability is tethered to whether you’ll “amount to something.” There’s no practical backup for when you fail to perform as the person you’re supposed to be. So even though you’ve planned ahead for your material well-being, there will always be another uncertainty with the next thing you’re supposed to achieve.

Now, just to apply to nine MFA programs and a Fulbright, as you detail in your letter, is no easy feat. On the surface, as I said above, it’s a very practical way of steadying your prospects. Work, however, can also be a defense mechanism; it can be an impulse you follow for a sense of control in uncertainty. Working can preoccupy you from worrying about the future, but it also gives you an imaginary hold on it. If you’re feeling unsure about your future, doing one more MFA application will distract you and increase your odds, right?

It’s understandable why work is comforting. There’s a point A to a point B! There’s prerequisites and progressive tasks! There are roadmaps! More than something to do with your hands, work gives you a role to play; a way to be useful; a place in the world of your life.

Working towards the ever-moving next achievement, however, can also be so comforting that it becomes an escape. Your personal achievements are more than likely those of the group’s, not your own. The tasks are ever-changing; the challenges ever-progressing. The only limit to the work you could be doing is your imagination. And, in a place like the US, where overworking is normalized, rewarded, and tied to a nationalist mythology of rugged individualism, there are no external signposts to tell you how much is enough.

Why am I harping on work when your question is about potential? Potential implies that you are not yet who you are supposed to be—to be a promising future is to be a rejected present. It’s a deal of the soul—a promise you’re supposed to keep if you want to reach salvation. Every achievement, each one more difficult than the last, lures you with this promise. Yet, perhaps every time you’ve kept your side of the bargain, it never quite feels like what you imagined.

As much as children need love and safety when they grow up, they also need structure: an easy way to know that if certain things are in place, then their needs will be taken care of. The structure also tells them where they belong in the world of their origin family. Without structure, you may have gotten used to making it up—parenting—yourself. With a lot of structure, you may have been very good at picking up on these outer expectations and delivering on them, maybe sometimes despite your own preferences and needs.

So, perhaps, a young version of you looked within and without. Maybe you worked harder on the parts you could play in hopes it would bring love back to you. Maybe you wondered if your achievements could overshadow those things, conscious or not, you believed were wrong with you.

Yes, you’re having trouble with this current uncertainty, but it’s not about Fulbrights or MFAs. The stakes you’re feeling are old, and they have to do with love. Love that you’ve always wanted, that you’ve worked for and waited for, but for reasons out of your control, you have not been able to receive reliably. And this habit of looking to the next thing all the time, KZ, of wanting to live up to your potential, has nothing to do with who you want to be. It’s about grieving the love you were never supposed to work for. It’s about letting go of the love you are still waiting for.

What does it mean to be recognized, to be seen, by those you love? When we are children, the conditions and definitions of being seen are given to us by our caretakers. We try our best to grow within the terms handed down to us. It is, in many ways, about survival at any cost. Perhaps at this time, you learned to kick down an inconvenient you—the one who wanted love out of turn; the one who cried too much; the one who wanted to write poems all day instead of going to school.

You’ve worked to be someone else, all these years, because you felt you had no choice. To send out applications and to wait for judgment—it’s not unlike the ways we send out bids for love. Yet, no matter how much you climb each new milestone and unlock your “potential,” you’ll always be disappointed in how the future doesn’t hold the past. The love you wanted is not coming back. It may not have ever been there in the first place.

Because, KZ, no matter how practical you may feel yourself to be, it’s not the practical side of you who wants so much to achieve. It’s the inconvenient you, the one full of feelings and needs, who keeps on hoping they’ll be loved if only they waited a little longer, if only they did a little more. No matter how many times their love is not reciprocated, no matter how much time has passed, it’s the part of you who’s been most beaten back who believes that love can still be had.

That is, the recognition and love you’ve always wanted lives inside you, in a person who’s witnessed your pain, who can tell about it better than any other. Of course, this person is yourself, but they are the part of you who’s watched your long nights and weekends; who knows of the loneliness you dare not speak of; who openly holds each memory of love you are embarrassed to treasure—this part needs you too. It takes tremendous heart to hold this much love for so long and to not speak of it. Share a little in the burden. Give your heart room to break.

‘I Haven’t Had a New Idea in a Year. How Do I Think Again?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’ve been writing slowly-but-seriously for a few years. I write nonfiction and have written several essays that I am proud of. But—and I’m aware this is a cliché of a problem—I’m feeling stuck and out of ideas. The essays that I’ve written all happened more or less like this: I encountered something (a book, a movie, etc.) that seemed, in some way, to relate to my life. I thought about it for a while to figure out what that relation was. Finally, I sat down to write, already knowing what the structure/outline of the essay and its main idea was. I like this way of working. I have something to write towards and I can focus on the language. Sometimes my idea changes while I’m writing but I know how to get started. Now, though, nothing is catching my eye and I don’t know what to write. I’m worried that I’ve forgotten how to think. I watch a movie or read a book and have no thoughts about it, and therefore no way to connect it to my life. I have nothing in particular in my life that I’m interested in exploring either.

I’ve asked other people what they do when they’re feeling out of ideas and uninspired and tend to get two pieces of advice: 1) just write and 2) give it time. But I struggle with both of these. Since I like to write when I have an idea already, it’s hard to “just write.” When I sit down in front of a blank page with no idea already in mind, I have nothing to say. When I try to push through anyway and write whatever comes to mind, it's all grocery lists and to-do lists for my day job and reminders about friends with birthdays coming up. And as to “give it time”—I have been! I haven’t had a new idea in so long (at least a year) and it’s starting to depress me. Especially because I would eventually like to try to find a way to make a career for myself that’s more related to writing than my current day job. I don’t want to wait forever to do that but it feels like I can’t start that process unless I’m actually, well, writing.

How do you find new ideas when the well is dry? How do you learn how to think again?

Sincerely,
Out of Ideas

Dear OI,

Thank you for your letter. It’s understandable that you are frustrated and worried that your writing may never recover from this pause. From your letter, I can see a few different factors at play, some you are not doubt already aware of, and others that I hope will dislodge you from this rut you’ve been in for some time.

First, to deal with the obvious: you’re putting pressure on yourself to write more so you can have a writing career, and you want a writing career so you can write more. Even saying this out loud, of course, shows how circuitous it is: writing is the thing that you want, right? So why don’t you write?

I used to say to myself that if only I had the time, I would be a writer. My big lesson of 2021 was, in fact, that having time doesn’t make writing happen. I, and you, make the writing happen. When the writing isn’t happening, it can feel as though you’re proving to the critic inside of you that you don’t have the talent or work ethic to actually be who you say you are.

Take a second and honor those feelings, OI, if you can sense you are so stricken. You have to, actually. Else, you’ll find yourself doing strange things, like writing things that don’t give you any pleasure (like grocery lists), writing things that you actively hate (like essays you’ll regret), or avoiding writing in all ways you can, so you can save yourself from kicking up those anxieties.

Then there are the fluxes and permanent changes roiling through the world today. I would be surprised if your life or the lives of your loved ones haven’t changed in these two years of pandemic and climate change, years that have been roiled, too, with continuing political turmoil around the world.

Your inability to think isn’t an innate flaw—it’s a symptom of a prolonged emergency response to the cascading instabilities around you. How can you reasonably envision a future when everything you’ve learned to expect in life may not exist when you get to it?

Now, I’ve written about writing in chaos and the pressure of making a career in the past, so I won’t delve deeper into those aspects. Today, for you, I want to talk about another kind of block: boredom.

I’m thankful that you shared your previous essay process with me. I’m able to make this observation about boredom because you did. What you described, to me, was a formula for writing. There’s nothing wrong with formulas—you might even call them forms. A structure is a question: how will you fill it this time? And with different inputs going in—in your case, books and movies—there’s enough interest to keep you growing, at least for a little while.

But something changes when you use the same structure repeatedly: the nuts and bolts begin to sag with wear; the previously shiny stops keeping your interest. You take longer and longer to find something you want to respond to. You start to notice patterns, like how in popular house tracks in the 2010s the drop always happens at around 1:00.

This is not, as you may fear, a death knell for your creativity. It’s actually quite a good sign. Your being bored indicates that you have engaged with enough material through this form that you’re starting to see the same arguments or themes it can offer you. It’s just a sign that you’ve grown and you’re ready for something new.

Here comes the fun part: how will you get to this “something new?” Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what that is. However, I can say that what you need now, beyond anything else, is difference, difference, difference.

Boredom and burnout are similar in that they physically and emotionally drive you out of situations in which you no longer wish to be. Routine keeps us thinking the same thoughts and using the same words—it’s possible your old way of writing has not borne fruit because you don’t have anything new in your life to relate to it! Change that. Take a vacation, even if it’s a local one. Move around the furniture in the space you live in. Read on about a topic or in a genre you’ve always been curious about but never gave yourself the time to do.

If you imagine a plant, it doesn’t, and can’t, both grow and stay in the same spot. Expansion requires the search for light. Plants also have growing seasons. If you’ve ever had a perennial, you’ll know that it dies back once winter comes along, but spring will bring a hint of green again.

There’s a necessary component of writing that requires death—death that brings the worms, the fungus, the decomposition that holds the wisdom of all that has been eaten up by those organisms. Your writing dies in order to make room for new growth. It also dies in order to submerge itself in the wisdom of all that you do not yet know. The work happens when it is unseen.

In other words, give yourself space to dream stupid and big. I’m not talking about career moves or life milestones—I mean what kind of art have you told yourself you’ll “get to later,” the art you’ll do when you can truly relax? What would you do if that time was now? Whether it’s crocheting, poetry, or building a computer, gift yourself the luxury of time and security. Allow yourself an hour of suspended reality—or fifteen minutes, if an hour’s not possible.

You’re already well-equipped to weather this change. You know to make a change when your original thesis no longer serves the work. You know how to give this flexibility to yourself. Now apply that kind of flexibility to where you house your creative energy.

Your last question was: how do you learn how to think again? And the truth is, much of the world we live in now makes it terribly difficult to think. You might be having a nice time on a walk and then— ping! —a notification tells you that there’s another variant on the loose or your family member is in the hospital. The vulnerable are more vulnerable. And we can’t adjust to a new normal that never seems to settle.

Thinking is not easy to do in more stable times, let alone now. I would give yourself a little grace around this. But I will say, also, that there are ways to think even in the worst of times. This letter contains only some of them.

One does not lose the ability to enjoy pleasure when it does not come around often, or when it is something one has given up entirely. Rather, the question becomes, how can you still enjoy being alive and enjoy being human even in the worst of times? What can you give yourself that helps make living feel worthwhile again?

Your life is still happening. The best thing about “nothing” is that it costs nothing to make. It can be something you recite to yourself, phone dead, no paper, while waiting for the subway. You can have nothing when you are alone in your home quarantined from your loved ones. The beauty of art is that it makes the nothing we can give ourselves. It never ceases to be nothing. It can always come home.

‘Does My Poetry Have to Be Difficult to Be Real?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I have been writing poems since my late teen years. But they were less poems and more volcanic eruptions of emotions. Over the years though things have gotten a bit serious. My reading influences have changed and it has started reflecting in my writing, too. I read everything from Tranströmer to Ada Limón to Basho’s haikus to Walt Whitman. However, the academics of poetry is something that I find incredibly technical. I believe in writing from a place of intuition and feeling and rewriting from the same place, too. But when I look at the “real poets” out there and their heavy leaning and discourse on various theories, forms, and technicalities of a poem, I kinda feel like I am a fraud. Also, I am not a huge fan of hardcore literary criticism and analysis. I dislike treating poetry as a science that needs to be decoded and like to keep an open space for wonder. For me, it’s more like a river - you skinny dip despite not knowing swimming. I love accessible poetry that allows curiosity to thrive. But I sometimes fear sounding like a noob when I say I dislike reading difficult poems or poems that you have to break your head over for hours to get to the core. I want poetry to be accessible to the non-poetry folks, too. Like Mary Oliver’s poems. I want to write simple poems reflecting a deeper truth. But every “real” poet out there is nose deep in theory, in flexing their knowledge of literary academia. It feels overwhelming. When I compare myself to these people, I feel very small and it feels as though I am not serious about putting my words out there. I work a full-time job and have been unable to stick to a writing routine of sorts, so there’s that too, which makes me feel like I am not living a writer’s life and therefore am inadequate in my art. How can I feel like a real poet?

Sincerely,
Not A Real Poet

Mumbai, India

Dear NARP,

Let me get you the short answer first: no, you do not need to write poetry teeming with theoretical allusion in order to be a real poet. You already know this, given your example of Mary Oliver, who we both know to be wildly (and preciously!) successful. Yet, I want to get a little deeper into the marrow of the question you pose at the end of your letter.

I had a similar trajectory to yours in poetry. I wrote poems starting in my teens less as exercises in forms and more just to write out my feelings. Perhaps, like me, you were encouraged to take on an economically stable career early on in life. So off I went to study something else, and, soon thereafter, even though I loved my English classes and writing workshops, I pursued another career while poetry stayed firmly on the wayside.

As my peers went on to do MFAs and pursue their PhDs, I fumbled through evening workshops and read literary magazines. I questioned why my work seemed so different than the poems in those magazines, but I also wanted to have work accepted into those magazines. For some reason, I needed those acceptances in order to accept myself as a poet. I wouldn’t allow myself to be one without them.

Despite doing well in writing, I had internalized a belief that I should not be a writer. The messages were sometimes outright—my family steering me away from writing—or they were implied, as when my emotional survival was predicated on my economic independence. Poetry, to me, was framed as a nice-to-have, and as so often happens to what we want, it fell to the wayside on the way to doing what I “had” to do, so much that even I began to doubt that I should, or would ever, have it. I needed proof not only for others, but for myself as well.

And how could I have given myself permission when I had no stable role models to teach me how? Even when I did look to learn poetry, I thought I had to do so in linear progression, like how one learns addition and subtraction before moving onto algebra. Like in grade school, I expected my education to include teachers who would reveal those hidden building blocks. In the absence of a formal program, I looked outward to those magazines and those poets whose work, bolstered by years of training I hadn’t yet received, felt distant in a way completely removed from how I was writing. Yet, I still looked up to their models as the algebra I would one day have to master if I wanted a poetry career.

Even as someone who likes analytical work both in and out of the academy, I have feared, at various times, that my poetry was missing a crucial component that would ensure its success, be it intellectual rigor, contemporary relevance, or just plain quality. The component often changes. Yet, at every point I have had these doubts, I’ve noticed that they have less to do with writing and more to do with the pre-conditions necessary for the writing itself: will I have a career that will garner me money that will buy me time to write? Am I talented enough to—? Am I networked enough to—? The concerns led back, almost always, to time to write.

Do you want a writing career or do you want to write? The difference in priority is immense. If you care more for the career, then you’ll end up deriving your permission by comparison to highly visible writers. But if you care more about writing, and a career seems the way to do it, your permission derives from whether you will let yourself write.

You know that saying, don’t put the cart before the horse? Well, in poetry, one’s career is the cart, not the horse. The capitalist mindset we’ve been taught assumes that a life of poetry must be pulled by a career, and a career only being possible if one is “enough”—enough of a fit, enough of an intellect, enough of a talent.

Now, looking back, I didn’t want those acceptances because I cared for a career. I cared for being told that there was at one other person in the world who looked at my work and said, yes, this is enough . I cared for having, at last, the freedom to claim my life as my own, a life that I would devote to writing, which was in turn the only thing I did that was solely devoted to myself.

Perhaps we want to turn our passions into careers because our jobs represent the time that doesn’t belong to us, but should. You are, at this moment, resisting difficult poetry. But is it difficult poetry you’re resisting, or the notion that in order to write “serious” poetry, you have to write in traditions that you don’t care for? That is, are you resisting yet another part of your life being taken up by what something you don’t truly want?

To feel like a real poet, you need to feel support for the life you truly want. But you also have to be ready to receive this support when it appears before you, and to recognize it when it comes. The support I’m talking about is not winning national awards or even getting a recommendation from a famous poet. The support you need to remember is the kind you receive from the person who comes to thank you at the end of a reading; it’s the friend who puzzles with you over the writing industry as you have coffee while trading drafts; it’s the small magazine editor who treasures your submission and the poem you’ve placed with them. Your proof is closer than you think—you’re a real writer to them.

There are more traditions in poetry than the magazines or institutions that can hold them up. Poetry is a thinking art, one in which language has permission to play in whatever part of consciousness you hope to convey. Some of those traditions do love to build on academic theory, but academia is not so far away from the thinking one does while walking down a stream.

The word “difficult” can be thrown at poems that are inaccessible in one way or another. But not all inaccessibility is a bad thing. Difficulty, for example, may just refer to difference. I wouldn’t expect someone who doesn’t know Chinese, for example, to understand Chinese in multilingual poem. It might be my purpose, in fact, to keep that part of the poem for Chinese speakers, especially those who grew up with not only the language but the cultural allusions that can only come from that lived experience. Rather than something to be conquered, the unknown might stand for the independence of one life from another.

The truth is, NARP, I don’t think you dislike difficult poetry. The poetry you speak of as “accessible” in itself contains its own kind of difficulty. The spiritual aspect of poetry, that wonder you speak of, requires embodiment, contemplation, and attention that is not usually cultivated in assessment-oriented school curriculums or productivity-oriented workplaces. The difficulty of wonder, of embracing the unknown, is difficult to receive for those who are not yet receptive to it.

As I said earlier, poetry is a thinking art, one in which both you and I have permission to speak as variously as we dare to. The difficulty is not in learning a set of techniques or a rote progression of literary history, but the courage to think and act toward the art, and world, we truly want. The difficulty is in holding difference not in competition with each other but together, at once, without diminishing their distinctions. To truly honor the other by learning to include our own.

‘How Do I Write If I Never Finish Anything?’

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you for The Reading . I always find so much solace in your words, and often return to your letters again and again.

I think my problem is that I don’t actually know how to write. My mind often feels pretty blank in terms of ideas, and I tend to reach towards what I think I want to create by following the feeling and longing it produces in me. This results in pages and pages of writing! But it’s always writing around projects, metatextual notes that I never know how to actualize into prose or verse. The idea of a book just seems so insurmountable.

When I was a PhD candidate, I had this same problem with my dissertation—and ended up dropping out after nearly a decade. I also did some freelance content writing, producing thousands of words a week, and that was working directly on projects...but I totally burnt myself out. I’m now in my thirties and I have a couple of novels in progress that I’m worried will just end up as more piles of paper. I’m even in a workshop right now that I really love as a writing community, but I can barely bring myself to generate drafts.

While I do write a lot, I also spend most of my time on social media, and haven’t been able to break the habit. But even when I block these sites, I just end up spending the time refreshing email, vaguely hoping for some great opportunity to fall into my lap. As a kid, I read constantly, but these days I hop from one book to the next on any given day, never finishing anything. I often feel that I don’t have enough time to do the things I want to do, but simultaneously I procrastinate on the things I love and fill my time with meaningless chatter and memes.

Lastly, I don’t know how to separate my writing from a desire for external validation, publication, or desire for fame. Sometimes I think maybe I kept writing because other people told me I was good at it, and maybe I don’t even like it that much, but I hope that’s not true because I’m not very good at much else. And sometimes I do find real joy in writing, but the issue of feeling blocked still stands.

How does one actually write a book? And how can I shake these feelings and find happiness and contentment in writing again?

Sincerely,
Life Blocked

Dear Life Blocked,

Let me say that I so relate to feeling as though you have no time while simultaneously procrastinating on the things you love. It’s complicated, to say the least, and happens to so many writers. While I can’t tell you how to write a novel, I can say a little bit about these strange habits of yours (and mine) which seem two sides of the same coin.

My hypothesis is this: the K-12 education within capitalism teaches people that the way to work is plan first, work later. This is variously reinforced by the ways we are spoken to as children, such as What will you be when you grow up? and How will you use your talent in writing? A plan is set in motion about who you are and your success is measured by how well you meet it. I would venture to guess that this plan mostly worked for you, since you ended up in a PhD program!

But following The Plan would come at a cost. Your options, as you aged, would narrow with every writing contest you won. No longer could you be a firefighter or an astronaut, you had to be a poet or a playwright. One wrong answer, one toe out of line, and the entire thing would start crashing down. All your energy would have to go into coloring within the lines.

Soon, you can’t rest at any milestone you achieve because there’s always the next one to prepare for. You make so much space in your life for The Plan that you stop making space for your own curiosities. You get used to telling yourself I can’t right now and, if you’re optimistic, write a note to yourself to come back later.

With your PhD, you’re at about two decades of perfecting the art of clocking The Plan, grinding your teeth, and getting through whatever pile you’ve been handed. It also puts you at about two decades of pushing your creative ideas to the wayside, appeasing them quickly with meta-textual IOU notes.

Your mind is blank because you’ve been rewarded for keeping your mind—and any other plans—blank to make room for the next assignment, dinner, or last-minute emergency that came up instead.

You’ve now left your PhD, but you didn’t stop thinking plan first, work later. I’m sorry to say, for you and me, that you can’t plan your way into writing a book. In fact, I believe it’s one of the worst ways to approach writing a long-form manuscript if you have been a hard worker all your life. It’s too easy to slap on the same old ways of doing things over a new life.

It makes sense to stick to a paradigm that’s brought you so much success elsewhere. But most of your plans came from other people. So your only options from there is to look outward for your milestones (see: the career trajectory, MFAs) or to make them up yourself.

When you make a plan for yourself, you’re also casting the same critical eye on yourself. Except it’s ten times worse because you don’t have a boss to complain about or a path to live up to. Your life has suddenly become about living up to yourself—what you’ve really always wanted. It is work that matters. It is work that, if you fail, would mean figuring out not only a new plan, but new meaning for your life itself.

That lingering fear that you have no time? That hope for an email that will fish you out of all of this? It’s now not about a tenure-track job offer, but existential. The need for that agent, that prize, or that manuscript acceptance has not only a monetary attachment but a spiritual one. There’s so much pressure on the writing you are doing now that you may be matching the efforts you put into your PhD, or have doubled them.

A few years back, I had a major surgery. Before I came home, I had planned to get a lot of writing done during my leave from work, but the fatigue from my recovery didn’t let me read, let alone write. Rather than distress, I felt relief at this. For the first time in my adult life, I could do nothing but rest.

You might be blocked, LB, because your body is trying to teach you the same thing. While there may not be physical bandages in sight, you are also in recovery. And rather than diving immediately into another line of work, your body is asking you to rediscover rest first.

Rest, completely unproductive time, is what you had when you were a child. With someone else responsible for your survival needs, time didn’t lead anywhere then but to more time. You could read however much you wanted, write that which fancied you. But twenty years ago you began to forget what that kind of leisure could feel like.

Planning and working have become your first impulse in how to spend your time In the same way you might worry about hitting milestones by a certain age, so too you may be worried about reaching a word count at a certain time. But this was not always the case. The anxiety of reaching a goal may be louder than other feelings for writing like pleasure, surprise, or curiosity, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you want to learn how to write, you have to start relearning how to listen again to your body first.

You can start with a small, simple practice of asking yourself one question every day: What do I want to do today? Make space for one request, even a silly one, that comes into your mind. Then commit to doing it that day and see how you feel. Start your scale at the lowest setting. From there, you can start practicing on the writing itself.

Art is the opposite of following a plan. Art is play, art is messiness, art is paint on your face and the walls. Art is running your colors outside the lines. Art is one of the few places where your mistakes don’t really matter—in fact, they may make the work better overall.

In other words, writing is the by-product of critical, embodied contemplation. There is no plan that is not interrupted. Nor is there work that can done without feeling.

The best advice I can give you about how to write is to reward yourself first with what you want to do. Every time you have an impulse to write a novel’s meta-textual note, ask if you can turn that into a character description, a scene, or exposition. Rather than plan first, use that energy to write first.

After twenty years of “I’ll write this later,” you only have practice at writing about your writing, not writing itself. So when you set aside time to write, really allow yourself to get right to the point: building your abundance in a way you can see, as it will help assuage your anxieties that you can’t write at all.

In other words, writing is writing first, plan later. It takes practice to jump into exactly what you want, practice to use the right words immediately. Give yourself a wide berth to make mistakes. Write so much that it doesn’t matter what you end up throwing away.

If it’s good, your writing will teach you something you never could have planned, but it won’t happen unless you let yourself begin. True creative work is not a place you have to be or a thing you must accomplish. It is a process, maybe even an obsession, but worrying about the end will dissipate the magic. If things go well, you will likely find yourself writing, thinking about the big picture, then writing again. Give in to your process, which you must now discover. Let it guide you to what you don’t know.

My hope for you is that you’ll one day write because you’re falling over yourself to get everything down, knowing that in a second it may disappear forever. It does. But it doesn’t matter so much as we think—the rain comes back, as does the sun. The writing life is about cultivating the kind of desire that doesn’t care about mistakes; the kind of desire for which mistakes, silence, and blank space are only another additive factor.

The more that I write, the more I’ve learned that there are multiple kinds of desire and satisfaction in making art. There’s the hard-won desire of working out difficult topics, as I do here in these letters; there’s also the joy of gentle accidents that pull my poems together. To feel these desires, you have to write, not outline. That is, your dreams are out there, in the world, to be experienced with your gifts of consciousness, which you are worthy of because you already have them.

‘What If I’m Just Missing…Talent?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I really loved your letter on rejection from last week, so much so that I tried it as a journaling exercise: “acknowledging that missing part, knowing intimately what it is, and loving yourself so much that you are willing to transform in order to try and try again”. But as I journaled, I realized (and this realization has been coming on for a while) that my missing part isn’t external validation, but simply… talent. What do you do when you realize you are flatly untalented, but you still like writing? Do you continue, embarrassing yourself and anyone who reads your work (because, of course, embarrassingly, I still want my writing to be read)? Do you do yourself and the world a favor and stop?

I know, I know. “What is talent without hard work?” “Many writers weren’t the most talented, but the ones who stuck with it.” But, you have to have a bit of talent, no? Even if just as a base. Even if just as potential. A bird can fly longer and higher as their muscles develop, but a turtle will not fly, no matter how many times they throw themselves off a ledge.

Anyway, I’ve been throwing myself at writing for some years now: writing or editing every day, reading regularly, analyzing other people’s writing, taking classes, submitting, joining mentorship programs… Not good enough to get published or win awards, not bad enough to lose hope completely. I think I did know I couldn’t cut it all along, but so many people around me were so kind and encouraging (I was so lucky to have them, this is not a complaint at all!) that I missed all the signs telling me I should give up. But now that I’ve had this realization, it’s hard to unrealize that even if I worked as hard as I could, the best I could hope for is mediocrity.

Thank you in advance!

Just A Turtle

Dear JAT,

My first impulse, when I read your letter, was to tell you immediately that awards and publication are meaningless, but that would be disingenuous, coming from someone who has received both. Awards and publication do matter, but they don’t matter in the way that you think. You see them as indicators of your innate ability. And why wouldn’t you? From challenge programs, IQ tests, and writing contests, we’re taught from a young age that there’s such a thing as natural aptitude. Kids are corralled and separated between average and honors. Now, as adults, our stories are awarded first, second, and third place; our poetry collections are either published, finalists, or rejected.

We could go further down this industry critique, JAT, but it wouldn’t tell you anything very new about the structural issues in the world, and it doesn’t quite get to what I’d rather do in these letters: talking about writing as it means to you, and what you can do. The structural issues do matter, unequivocally yes, but their influences are not the only possibilities. Life is not, as much as it may feel like, a corporate, imperialist, and patriarchal Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. And giving in to the game as the only reality only leaves us deeper in it.

Instead, I want to tell you a story, as you’ve told yours to me. When I was young—I don’t mean twenty, I mean I was eight or so—I very badly wanted to be a writer. By then I was starting to read through maybe even a hundred books a year, which I would do until middle school. Every year in elementary school, there was a contest called Young Authors, to which every student could submit a ten-page story. Every year, I started a story for Young Authors with the meticulous detail necessary to begin a 400-page novel. Inevitably, the tenth page would come too early in the story, and I would be forced to end them disastrously—either with to be continued or an abrupt plot twist that annihilated everything I had started. I had read so many fantasy books by then that I knew exactly how I wanted my book to feel when I read it. So when that tenth page rolled around, it was never quite what I had envisioned.

However, as you know, I was also eight. I didn’t have the life experiences of a 35-year-old. My knowledge of interpersonal, societal, and geological dynamics were, shall we say, immature. They were, at best, received patterns from books that were themselves only representations of reality. But when one is eight, these considerations aren’t part of the equation. I continued to submit my stories to Young Authors, believing them to represent my merit alone. The contests would pass them over. Eventually, I took the silence as verdict, and I stopped writing fiction.

Why did my eight-year-old self still send those stories, even though I knew they weren’t as good as I wanted? I held out hope that somehow an adult would read them and see the diamond in the rough, and that I would be singled out, exempted from having to hold court in the desert, and someone would lead me all the way to the oasis in which I belonged. My stories were imperfect and barely started, just like me. I wanted an adult to see me as I hoped I was. I wanted an owl to deliver me a magical acceptance letter at eleven; I wanted to be the heir to an ancient kingdom.

Perhaps we want talent because, simply, we want to be chosen. It’s not so much I cared about being called gifted. It’s the fact that I had already learned, at eight, that no one would come hold me if I wasn’t. Talent is the name we give it because talent is what adults see—a marvelous performance, seemingly natural and magic, that comes from children. But children know more than what we give them credit for. I remember the work I put into those stories. I remember how badly I wanted them—and me—to be loved.

You’re not missing talent, JAT. You’re not missing external validation, either. You’re missing care.

When we’re coming into consciousness, we need other people to reflect to us not only our selves as we are but also the selves we could potentially be. Without that reflection, all we have are wild guesses in the dark. The vast, dark ocean. The endless dust of the desert. It’s not the endlessness of potential, but the endlessness of being lost.

Our first way finders, our markers, are the caretakers in our lives. They point in directions we might try to go in; they keep the lights on so we can find our ways back. It’s the absence of this attention that makes us feel that our risks were not enough, or that our risks are too great.

Your potential retreat has nothing to do with your love of writing. Rather, you seem to be at the precipice of a difficult truth of your life. That is, when you said at the end of your letter “that even if [you] worked as hard as [you] could, the best [you] could hope for is mediocrity,” you were talking about yourself. But is this really about you? Or have you, in your life, always been working this hard, only to receive mediocrity in return?

As children, we don’t have the worldly knowledge to understand our caretakers. We only have the power see them appear and disappear from our lives. We know that we want to be loved and will learn what we need to to get it. So we grow up, reinforced by the worldly systems that reward the same behavior: trying to improve our performances, then waiting for love. No one tells you, as a child, what you should have had.

Talent is the internalized, mythic substitute for what you deserved to have, but didn’t. You deserved safety and belonging. You deserved a stable place from which to roam. You deserved a way to fail without losing your worth, a number-one-fan you didn’t have to impress. You deserved someone who could tell you about the world; someone who could tell you that you already had a place in it.

It’s easier, in a way, to turn on ourselves as the reason for our pain. As children, it’s all we have to make sense of it. If it’s about who we are, then there’s hope that we can change and control it. For a while, proving that you had talent was the thing you could work at—it was the thing you could control. Improving over another year of classes, for example, or finally winning that contest. But with all these rejections, your fears are getting confirmed, and the hope you had is getting smaller.

It would be less painful to just give up. If you’re untalented, then the rejections can be explained away. There’s no reason for you to face the pain you truly feel when you receive them. There’s no embarrassment about your desire to be loved, because you can conclude that you’ll never be loved.

But is it true that you’ll never be loved? Yes, JAT, it may be time for you to take a break from writing, but not because you’re mediocre. The adult version of this industry, the talent-mongering side of it with its ulterior motives, has stripped the fun from what you love to do. I want you to take a break from that part, the part about being published and winning awards.

I want you to journal, instead, about the first time you ever wrote. What can you remember creating, from childhood to now? Who was there to witness it? Can you be the witness you never had? Go back and do your due diligence. Give love to that person for every attempt. Your writing can start with an audience of one. But at least it will be a genuine one.

Calling yourself untalented defends you from disappointment, but doing so means erasing all that you have done over these years. To do so means to keep out not only the rejections, but also every person who has tried to give you encouragement and care. It erases, especially, the thin light you’ve kept alive over the years, despite everything you’ve gone through and the neglect you’ve faced.

What ever happened to that eight-year-old? Well, I indeed stopped writing fiction, but only as an interlude. In the years after, I started drawing and playing violin. And some more years later, I would come upon a book of poetry at the library. I started writing for myself and thin light though it was, the path was lit enough to keep going. I stopped, again, when I didn’t win prizes. But this time, it was right before college, when my first-year literature professor would give us an option to write a story or an essay, and then, later, ask if I’d ever taken a writing class. The rest is history.

I had never stopped writing. I would choose it every chance I got. But I needed someone to notice me, someone to care. I’m not ashamed to admit this now because I know what it did for me. More than publications or prizes ever have, care told me not only that I mattered, but that I mattered to someone else.

Like me, you may not be able to keep writing without it, JAT, and it doesn’t have to come through writing. But don’t stop writing because you need it still, and it hasn’t yet arrived. The love you enact doesn’t have to look like the love you’ve received. Keep writing for yourself. Let your own light fill your life, and never let it out. Someone is on their way. Practice letting them stay when they arrive.

‘Someone Else Published My Idea. Now What?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

How do you deal with the fact that a work you’ve been working on for years has just been published...by someone else?

It’s not just that it deals with similar themes, or has a similar setting, or whatever, but genuinely has an almost exact copy of characters and setting and themes. Like it’s been plucked directly out of my mind by the author.

It’s not plagiarism, because they can’t possibly know what they’ve done, it’s just the incredible random chance of the universe, but it still feels awful. My work is now unpublishable because it will seem like plagiarism of THIS work.

I just feel so hopeless.

Yours sincerely,
I’ve Been Mind Hacked

Glasgow, Scotland

Dear IBMH,

Let me first sympathize with the fact that this has happened to you. As you say, you’ve spent years on this idea, and noticing a similarity, then this slew that you’ve described, must have been shocking and then devastating.

No doubt you’ve heard advice, perhaps even from yourself, that this chance occurrence in the universe is ultimately some sort of gift, a turn on the road you didn’t anticipate. As well-meaning as it is, these thoughts probably aren’t helping you right now.

We may tell ourselves that love poems have been written for millennia, that there are stories that never go out of fashion, but it’s harder to hear that argument after all the work you’ll likely done to get where you are now, from the books you read to figure out if your idea had been used elsewhere to the care you’ve taken to write your characters and plot points. It’s harder to make that argument to, say, the publishing house executive who smokes a cigar with a ruby ring on his little finger looking at your plot summary and drawling out, “Haven’t we got one like this already? Pass .”

Now, you know that this publishing executive is fictional, but even I have some version of him in my mind. I want my books to get that wide distribution—I want to help my editor make the case for my books as easily as possible. With a publishing industry still within a patriarchal white supremacist capitalist society, you might think each story must be completely unlike the stories that have come before it in order for it to sell. Intellectually, we know it’s more complex than that; we know these old tales are wrong. That doesn’t mean we aren’t haunted by them.

I often talk about the Celtic Cross tarot spread and the card placement that represents both hopes and fears. I’ve always been fascinated by this Janus-faced assignment. First, it forces you to confront the same idea as your hopes and fears. And then you must confront which one you can’t help believing.

One of the things you might have learned to do in your life is anticipating, and preemptively preparing for, the worst possible outcome. I myself built this into my psychological armor after many childhood moments of being left completely alone to my own devices, no matter what needs I had. My parents were not able to be there, whether it was because they were never taught how or because the structural impositions of class, race, and immigration were once again interrupting their abilities to care for me.

More often than not, the worst would come to pass, but at least I would have a plan when it did. It was repeatedly facing traumatizing situations that taught me to internalize impending doom not as a possibility but a prediction. That is, my life experience taught me that in certain areas, the future would always be bleak. If I had fears, they would always come true.

But there was also another part of my life—one that wasn’t connected to my traumas: reading and, eventually, writing. Through reading, other outcomes could occur. Through writing, these other things could even happen to me. Writing was in itself a blank slate, a pursuit I could control with no previous outcomes. In other words, writing held all the hopes of my life as I wanted to live it—it became one of the few places I could be free.

I say all this to you, IBMH, because it seems you’ve hit a setback in a part of your life where you’ve felt most hopeful. Perhaps you’re bereft from the loss of a secret dream, a secret hope, in a life where you’ve not allowed yourself hope. And now, as you say it, it seems this project will be unpublishable.

You’ve got every right to grieve in this moment. Take your time to do it. Take a month off, or a year. Pick up another activity that’s purely fun, like making miniatures or taking a vacation to read whatever you want. Let yourself cry; let yourself beat your fists into the proverbial air. But I also want you to write your fears down, one by one, and try to see them in another light. What would you say if you were honest with yourself on what you hope your book will do for you, too?

Because the great, terrible thing about fear, especially fear engendered by structural realities, is that it freezes you from trying for anything that you want again. Fear wants you to stay where you are: with the outcomes you already know and the odds you’ve absorbed into your intuition.

Your first fear, from your letter, is that your book will now never be published. You’re afraid, perhaps, that your book is just too similar to this other one. And then there’s the flip side to that too: you want your work to be published, and somehow that publication means something to you. What is it?

What would it take, for example, for you to believe that your work was still publishable? You likely have a different writing style than this other author. Are the characters you’ve written truly the same, or might there be some personality differences that make a big impact on the plot? There’s a way to know the truth, but it’s a scary one: to read the book you think has taken all your originality away from you.

It’s possible that you’ll say yes to all of the above. Depending on how similar the books are, it might be true that yours will seem derivative of this one, but being derivative doesn’t make your book any less likely to sell. Perhaps this is your other fear: you’re made a big effort to create something that feels wholly different because you want to feel different than everyone else. You need an assurance that you’re unique and therefore original, because if you are original then it means you’re irreplaceable. Because, perhaps, the bad outcome you’re fighting is the one in which you’re replaced.

Originality, however, has nothing to do with being different from everyone else. In fact, seeing originality as oppositional is to be trapped forever in relation to what you’re running from.

Part of being alive in a moment in history, in some shared context, is that many smart people are looking at the same things. And much of writing involves referencing writing that has come before us. Part of the pleasure of reading is figuring out how one author is talking to another—how Lolita and The Price of Salt are two very different American road novels, for example, or how there was a surge in vampire novels after Twilight . Remember, Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fanfiction.

Instead of being an island, originality is knowing where your bridges are. No poem or novel can hold your intrinsic value, nor are they written alone. Your writing is a pale expression of the web that lives inside of you: where you come from, where you are, and where you’re going. What you’ve read and seen and believed. What you’ve loved enough to repeat in the world.

What is this story you’ve been writing not in the eyes of a publishing executive, but you? What of your life have you put into it—are there traces of the people you know, the places you’ve been? The thoughts you’ve wanted to contemplate, or even the exhilaration of creation you’ve had, that you are also capable of that?

We treat our writing like we treat ourselves. We enact on it the beliefs we have about our own value, like: your story becomes worthless if there exists a similar or better one. Maybe that’s the outcome you’ve been trained to predict. But the joy of imagination is the risk of attempting new paradigms—it’s running back into the burning room where you were once left behind.

It’s true that we may live in a time where it’s hard to find hope—many of those stories have long been exhausted by our new realities. But your novel is not the only story you’re rewriting. When we write, we also get the chance to rewrite the stories of our life. Look at this scenario as your hopes and fears. How could you act as if those hopes were the future? Help yourself prove that death is not the only navigating value. Stay with your art when no one will. Don’t leave yourself behind.

‘How Do You Write About Joy?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I want to start off by thanking you for starting and continuing this advice newsletter. Each letter is so thoughtful and warm-hearted. I genuinely feel so happy when I get a notification that a new letter has arrived!

My question is a bit weird but I don’t know how else to express it: how does one write about joy? In my writing workshops we were taught to write about conflict and drama. We read unhappy stories, and learned how that unhappiness was expressed. That was valuable. But now I want to write about joy, and I have no idea where/how to start. For one, I just haven’t read a lot of joyful writing, and I don’t know where to look. If you have any recommendations, I would really appreciate it!

I remember one of my classmates wrote a story about a simple, enjoyable trip she took with her friends. The instructor attacked it repeatedly for its frivolity, and the workshop was spent tearing into the story for that specific reason. I’ve never seen that kind of viciousness for so-called serious stories. It was “lacking” and “boring”.

There are many ways to be, and write, unhappiness. How does one go about the other way? The many ways to be, and write, happiness?

Thank you so much for your care and work <3

Sincerely,
Frivolous, lacking, and boring

Dear FLB,

I am so, so sorry to hear about your classmate’s story and the way it was received by your instructor. To put a generous spin on it, your instructor may have been trying to teach you how to write what they perceive to be the “best” kind of work. Unfortunately, it’s experiences like that that scare many writing students from touching certain subjects or experimenting again in their careers—it’s hurtful in how it takes your freedom away, particularly the freedom you would naturally give yourself.

There are some reasons for why your instructor might value “unhappy” writing, as it may have been the case in your class. It could be because of misogyny, where frivolity and the ordinary are relegated to the less serious feminine. It could also be because of the belief that good writing must tackle big, universal issues, issues for which one must suffer or take responsibility for. There has to be a deeper meaning, your instructor might say, or else the writing doesn’t matter.

I started the first part of Dead Poets Society on the plane back from Iceland last month. I had avoided it as one might avoid the things that everyone else says you must know by heart. I am a poet, yes, but a poet of a fictional, white all-boys’ private school? No, I never thought so. But I continue to have things in common with people with whom I feel no allegiance. Such as this quote that I felt was cheesy but also have been thinking of often:

[M]edicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

What brings someone to art and poetry? For me, back in my Xanga days, it was choice quotes like this—quotes more likely to be seen on a random person’s blog than in a literary magazine. For some reason, as one gets deeper into writing, as we accumulate “taste,” we abandon these juvenile, less pure forms of the art we’ve come to love. But why? Have our hearts changed so much that these words are no longer relevant? Or were we all just shamed, either explicitly by our teachers or implicitly by the great stories and poems we seem to encounter?

So that critical voice might say this, too: if I want to be a writer then I can’t like puerile versions of “real” writing. If I want to be an artist, a profession in which it is necessary to play, I have to prove that I’m not merely playing. Yet, this performance is not staged for the art you want to make—perhaps it’s made for the onlookers who you perceive as having power over your access to resources, to love. Perhaps it’s made for onlookers who are waiting for you to slip up, to prove you’re not enough your citizenship or gender. Or perhaps it’s the responsibility you’ve put on yourself in a fragile balancing act: that you can’t play unless you’ve worked; that there’s too much at stake in the world now for you to get off the wire.

But first things first: before you can write about joy, you have to confront the part of you that doesn’t believe you can.

I don’t live in New York City anymore but I can’t stop seeing those videos on social media of water rushing out of toilets and several inches of water destroying the homes of strangers who just as easily could have been my friends. I can’t stop feeling Californian wildfire smoke in my throat all the way here in Vermont. I can’t stop my mind from wandering over to Texas , then Afghanistan , then Louisiana and Haiti .

Joy is hard-won. And increasingly few of us seem to be able to summon it. More of us are, say, mustering energy to live in defiance of racist brutality in thought and action; more of us are worried about where we can live, whether we will have places to live; more of us are not sure if home can remain a home. And around us a pandemic swirls in what seems like perpetuity as Delta and the rest of the Greek alphabet of virus variants keep mutating and infecting. Who, if they were a responsible citizen, would write about joy in these times? What would they write if they could?

Disaster at such a catastrophic scale as this—it silences us. For there’s not you can write to inform when the news is on everyone’s front porch. There are only so many times you can describe desolation in new ways when it’s happening again every day.

The will to survive is obliterating by necessity. Survival requires thinking ahead of thinking ahead. If you’re not careful, it can consume not only the time you’re living in emergencies but also the time between them. Here I’m thinking about what you said: “We read unhappy stories, and learned how that unhappiness was expressed.”

I believe art is a storehouse of experience. It is individually lived but collectively tended. Each person might contribute some sliver to this river of imagination, and in return we drink from its spring to untangle the memories of past lives.

We have models for unhappiness in an unhappy world imagining more unhappinesses. But many of us who have lived with structural oppression for so long can’t remember how to begin with happinesses—where the happy stories are, or how to learn to express them.

I’ve lived my life believing that only the worst is likely to happen. I inherited this belief through my family and then I grew up experiencing it in my own way, the way of my generation and time, and thus have never prepared for savoring the other side of what’s possible.

What do I do when I’m not trying to survive? Can I even imagine it? I still struggle to stop preparing for the next disaster. I’m haunted by history and followed by my memory of the bottom dropping out. But staying here isn’t an option, as much as I’d like to predict the future or allay the past.

The truly imaginative act, in catastrophe, is letting go of the promise of its end. It is to stop waiting for after in order to have now ; it is to pause enough at existing where I am so I can acknowledge, and have, true joy. As Lucille Clifton wrote,

come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Or, as Wisława Szymborska said,

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

It’s in these times that joy is more important than ever. To go back to the core of what matters; to remember that there’s not only a way to live, but a reason to live, not after but within all this.

I want to be able to say in the midst of disaster that we also read happy stories, and learned how that happiness was expressed. It could be Ross Gay finding his community at the fig tree on 9 ^th and Christian ; it could be a Hallmark card, in memes, or in the jokes you erase for yourself between the pages of a forgotten Victorian book.

Somewhere along the way, joy has been pushed out from the bounds of authenticity. Perhaps because we live in a world where it doesn’t seem real enough—because we live in a world where joy feels more imaginary than ordinary.

In my darkest moments, it was in Carly Rae Jepsen and rom-coms I trusted. I found reasons to live: to feel my laughter bursting from the seams of where I was; to let my soul touch everything I was capable of feeling, to stretch beyond that as much as I could, and celebrating that. You have permission to have this too. You’re alive right now. It’s your turn to pay attention.

‘What’s an “Emerging” Writer and How Do I Become One?’

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Long time reader, first time writer. Thank you for providing this community. It really feels like home.

To put my letter short, I have a single question: What does “emerging writer” mean?

Sure, many contest or grant or fellowship guidelines write their own definitions of “emerging”, so in terms of logistics, I feel like the best answer is “it depends”. But to make my letter long, well, as someone who has always been writing, it feels weird that I can’t call myself “emerging” by seemingly any of the terms.

Many of the writers I admire are still considered “emerging”; it took me a while to learn that chapbooks aren’t considered “published books” and that fanbases of tens of thousands of cross-social-media followers mean nothing.

I’m using a lot of quotation marks, but really it’s because I still don’t get it. If writers who have been nominated for pretty major national awards are “emerging”, then if I don't have an agent or a fancy manuscript ready, then does that make me a non-emerging writer? Whoops, that’s two questions.

I guess I just want to know your thoughts on how to fund your writing for your writing’s merit, aside from, of course, just working a ton of non-writing gigs, when you’re a non-emerging, non-established, seemingly secret writer.

Sincerely,
Emerging-ish

New Haven, CT

Dear E,

Once upon a time, I was part of an emerging poets issue of The Shade Journal . In it, editor and poet Luther Hughes asked each of us a set of questions, including “What does the title, ‘Emerging poet,’ mean to you?” At the time, I replied with this:

To be called emerging is a type of naming, and the exercise of naming, of categorization, of taxonomy, is also a performance of power. An emerging poet is only emerging to those who call them as such. Emerging poets always are the ones with potential. Interchangeable, never fully formed, the next one always available to be discovered.

You know and I know that the term is relative. Moreover, the term is relative to power, like the power to pick who sits on the jury, the power to appear knowledgeable enough to be picked, or the power inherent in reiterating the hierarchy. Back then, I was paying attention to who was getting called an emerging poet and stayed there, when writers were being named new and fresh but also junior and subordinate at best, allowed entry but not establishment, even if they were many years into their careers.

It seems you wrote to me because the “emerging writer” label seems lopsided, unattached to your reality, and as you look at contests, fellowships, and grants that might help you financially with your art, you’re unsure not only if you technically qualify, but if there’s any point in applying when you’re up against these “emerging” juggernauts. That’s because you’re not only up against them. You’re also up against a changing tide of aesthetics and concerns in, say, US poetry. You’re up against longstanding editors who may not understand new poetics and inexperienced ones might be getting swept up by impressive bios, growth metrics, and the double-edged convenience of publishing one’s friends.

My point here is not to explain everything systemically but to emphasize that much more decides on your “emergence” than the merit of your work. It takes the right writing at the right time with the right reader in the right position of power, and no amount of planning or networking can get you the last three even if you have the first. It’s not so much that you’re not emerging—it’s more likely that these other, nationally-recognized writers are being subordinated to permanent emerging status. An emerging writer is forever new, forever unfamiliar. And there are reasons of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability that keep their stories “new.”

For technical purposes, I’ll give you my definition off the top of my head: an emerging writer really does encompass anywhere between having published anything to having up to two full-length collections out in the wild, and even that limit might be questionable depending on the prestige of the prize. If you’re questioning if you qualify, then ask. If you can’t ask, then apply anyway. It’s that tired-in-talk-but-useful-in-action adage: don’t say no to yourself when someone else can. Allow yourself the adventure of the crapshoot.

At the end of your letter, E, you asked me how to make a living as a writer. Not: how to live as a writer. Yet, this is the only question I can answer for you, because it is the question I am figuring out as I write to you now, as I am writing ever. And because it might be the real question you’re asking me, as I’ve had to understand it was the real question I’ve been asking myself.

In the years that have passed, I’ve participated and benefited from what emerging means in the publishing industry, and after writing and ( soon ) publishing two books, winning awards, getting my MFA, and now teaching writing, I feel even stronger about what I said in The Shade Journal, having lived what it means. To be called emerging is a definition, like so many others, that others foist upon you. Even with it, perhaps because of it, public success is not financial security.

And now I have a hard question for you to answer, E: it may be that funding your writing with writing is your permission to write. If that’s not possible, would you still want to write?

I joke about this, but it’s true—about every few months I have an anxiety spiral over how I’m going to make a living as an artist. The drive to somehow fund my work becomes an obsession for a couple hours—I meander over tech jobs I don’t want, compile grants I won’t apply to, panic over courses I haven’t yet been asked to teach, and outline “commercial” books I’ll never write.

During these spirals, my previous successes don’t matter. In fact, I think no matter how many books I write, courses I teach, or subscribers I have at The Reading , I will always be starting over with myself. The sirens will blare their drones over my desk and try to pluck me from my seat. Their refrain nowadays is that my money and time are running out. There’s always the days they succeed and I will fly into the waves, again, for jobs and grants.

But days are better than years. There were the years I spent studying computer science and then working in tech, telling myself I would write when I had time. There were the years I spent loving other people, telling myself I would write when I had found a new family. And there were the years when I was never alone, telling myself nothing, because I was afraid of hearing what I had to say.

Ironically, the stable job writers usually aim for now is to be a college professor, where one’s daily role is not writing, but teaching. As an emerging (emerged?) writer, I now write after I’ve planned my next class or written my next letter. There’s always one more thing I have to do or that seems more important. There’s always one more thing I need to have to afford the luxury—the luxury of being who I say I am.

Today I am remembering that Linda Gregg used to call thrifting the last great treasure hunt: today that is how I feel about writing. And what I’m searching for, what I really want, is writing that reminds me that I’m alive. Writing that presses time and space past my singular body. Writing that tells me that at the same moment I’m breathing, you are breathing; that there are organisms alive I have never heard of; cities I have never truly understood; kinds of love that requires years upon years of accumulation.

Therefore I can only share what emerging has come to mean for me. It has not been the publication of a book, the gaining of an audience, teaching appointments, or speaking events: it has been slowly and painfully coming to terms that there is no such thing as a stable income for solely writing as I want to do it and slowly and painfully doing it anyway. A writing job, even if I had an office with a brass plate that said YANYI — WRITER, would not make me a writer.

As a writer, I must emerge from myself. I have to take myself out to that little office I now rent and take myself seriously. In there I have no editors or agents, no fans or department chairs telling me that I’m a writer. I have only myself. And in this it is no different from where I started out: alone in a library or my bedroom. The only difference is that I have tried desperately in the past to run away from myself—not because I was in some way lazy, but because I had been set aside by my own family to solve my “problem” by myself; because I had no concept of giving enough to the first person I loved; because I needed a job to get away from my family—all of this had to be dealt with because I could proceed with the simple act of sitting in a room by myself.

Before having a room’s of one’s own, there is the work required to reach it. Even now, after years of therapy and space and time, I still find it difficult to arrive at my desk at the customary time. I am doing better. But for years I wanted so desperately to have permission to be a writer first, I didn’t build the life I needed to write.

Would I say that I’m still an emerging writer? Yes, certainly—somewhere in that Neverland between a poem with my name under it appearing in public and the years of showing up, finally, at this space in where I now practice my craft every day. But the years between emerging from oneself and then being , simply, a writer, are many, and a good number of them so far have been uncertain and difficult.

A book is an occasion, an accumulation of the reams I’ve traveled to some point in my life. Often, by the time you’ve found my pages, I will already be on the road again. Each book is, in a way, an accidental destination, created from the realization that I am carrying too much again. Writing is my time; it is my journey; it is my life. I write to let the pages go.

So you see, the time of the writer and the time of the reader are necessarily separate. By the time you read my first lines, I have already given up the last. The readers who determine me “emerging,” who I was thinking of when I wrote that response a few years ago now, are judging a writer who doesn’t exist.

For this reason it’s impossible to pinpoint when a writer—you?—is emerging and when they have already emerged. A self vanishing into the woods, the last look of an eye before the head goes underwater—what does it mean to emerge? By the time the writer reappears, the work has already been done. The person who was in the process of emerging, well, that is not visible to any of us. In a way their disappearance into what others can never witness—well, that was always the point.

‘Will This Rejection Discourage Me Forever?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dearest Yanyi,

I know you have written about dealing with rejection before, but I feel like I may be ....... permanently damaged by this one. I applied to MFAs this year and didn’t get in to my top choice program (fully-funded, very popular, cornfields, you know the one). Not only was I rejected, I didn’t even get one of the fabled personal notes on my rejection letter encouraging me to keep writing or apply again next year.

The thing is, I KNOW I’m not having a proportional reaction to this. Friends and people in my writing group have given me all the right advice: you don’t need an MFA from a prestigious school to be a good writer, tons of people get rejected and especially from this program, it was an especially tight application season, etc etc. I know. But .... I am just so sad ???

And now it has been a few weeks and I can’t write, at all. I want to, and I have ideas I’m excited to work on, but every time I try I’m just taken over by this feeling of sheer embarrassment. Like I have the application committee reading over my shoulder and laughing at me for even trying.

I’ve had rejections before but none as big as this one, and I’m scared this is having a permanent effect on my confidence and ability to write. I still have a lot of unresolved questions (do I accept the program I DID get into, or just take some workshops and try again next cycle) but the biggest worry looming over me is: is this going to just stick like a barb in me forever, making me doubt every word I put on paper? Bc that would really suck.

Thank you and much love,
Dejected MFA Draftee

Dear DMD,

I wish I could follow-up to your letter with this question first, but to put it here will have to do. What did getting accepted to this program actually mean to you? You mention in your letter that you’re so sad, but the magnitude of the emotion is inexplicably above and beyond what seems appropriate for the situation. When this happens, it’s important to step back and dig deeper into the reasons why. In a way, you’re fortunate that this has happened to you with a situation that isn’t culturally coded to allow intense emotions (see: romance) as you’re more likely to notice that your response is more than the situation seems to call for.

I can briefly share my experience of working on the other side to help banish the nightmares of the admissions panel laughing at your writing. While I’ve never read applications for an MFA program, I have judged, juried, and edited for several years now, and while the criteria sometimes changes, a general formula for evaluation seems to remain the same. I can tell you now that I’ve never ever laughed at an application, nor have I witnessed another judge do so.

When you submit your application, it lands in a general application pile that gets sorted into smaller piles. Each of those piles is assigned randomly to a jurist, who, if the applications aren’t anonymized, double-checks that they don’t know anyone personally in the group and asks the program manager to swap them out if so. The jurist then rates the work sample and the accompanying materials from 1-10 based on their expertise in the field. The top scorers from each jurist’s pile are then added to a new pile that are evaluated again by everyone on the panel to vote on the final selections. You can add some rounds here if there are many, many initial applications.

You mention in your letter that you didn’t even get a personalized note from the application committee. Not knowing the actual process for that program, your application may have been rejected at any point in this process. It’s possible that you caught that jurist after a seventeen-hour day with no breaks from work and childcare. It’s just as possible that this year almost no applications received a tiered personal note, even though it has been standard practice, because of the affective exhaustion brought on by the pandemic, intense climate changes, and white supremacist violence across the US.

It’s comforting to some to hear the reality that you may have lost your chance at a dream school because your first evaluator wasn’t in the best mood (to say the least). For others, it may draw some ire, especially if you poured hours, if not weeks, into the careful curation of your application. Yet, why would you spend those hours in the first place? To return to the first question above, what did getting accepted into this program actually mean to you?

If you were hoping that getting into this school would validate your excellence as a writer, look at it this way: it’s not very logical to use an MFA application cycle to measure your individual growth as a writer. First, just applying is expensive. Second, the responses are lousy and non-specific. Yes, I’m talking about form rejections, but even acceptances, as programs are then courting you to actually come to the institution. Third, and this is my most cynical take, a program’s priorities are wrapped up not only in “excellence” or “fit” but in the ways your presence might earn them acclaim, should you one day go on to have a notable public career.

Now, you may have wanted to get in because this school was part of a larger vision for your life. You know that feeling when you’re excited about a possible new romantic partner? At first, you try to keep it casual. Soon, you’re fantasizing about plans a year from now and so on. And then you break up. The life you imagined together is suddenly gone because it can’t be exist without that person—that program—in place.

The last time an application cycle meant that much to me was when I was first applying to college. College was the beginning of something I could choose for myself. It was a next step to freedom. I could be out as queer without my parents’ scrutiny and, most importantly, I was going to find “my people”: those who shared my intellectual and artistic interests and those who also felt like outsiders, who were just too quirky to fit in. I pored over college surveys and chose my top school based on this dream of the life I wanted. I knew it was a long-shot, but I just felt as though I belonged there and their admissions team would recognize it. Before I had even sent my application, I had already chosen the dorm I would stay in and the clubs I would join once I got there.

Needless to say, I didn’t get in. I was devastated. I wanted to know what I could have done better. I didn’t understand what about me wasn’t good enough. You are probably doubly feeling this because writing is a vocation of passion. One doesn’t choose to write because they wants to make a six-figure salary—one chooses writing because, perhaps, making art reminds them of who they are. Being rejected when you’re proclaiming this to the world can feel as though you’ve been told that you aren’t who you say you are. Now you’ve been pushed off your balance and you’re looking for a way to right yourself.

If you want to escape from your problems, just fix yourself on a dream. Pay attention to what getting into this school would have done for you. What’s absent and what’s there? Do you have the attention you’ve always wanted to be loved and appreciated? Are you being reminded that you are loved as a writer? Perhaps you want to be affirmed that you are loved when you are most as you see yourself. It was written out for you in the flashing lights and this rejection means that this path is gone. Of course you are in so much pain. Getting in was your ticket to an important solution in your life. This MFA program was supposed to be part of it.

You need to let go of the life you romanticized with this MFA program. But letting go isn’t running in the opposite direction, pretending that it never happened. Letting go is about admitting to yourself that you really love writing. To have imagined a life for yourself for which you have so much passion is valuable information: it’s a clear glimpse into the dreams you want for yourself. Why is it that you needed to be accepted by this school? What part of you needed this acceptance so you could accept it yourself?

Grief is looking that long life you imagined all the way down, one more time. To memorialize it properly, you must admit to yourself not only that you wanted something, but that you wanted it that much . It means that you can’t go back to numbing yourself or to being okay—it is about acknowledging that missing part, knowing intimately what it is, and loving yourself so much that you are willing to transform in order to try again and again. Moving on from this fantasy means keeping the part that gave you hope; it means wanting as much as you want, not how much you should; it means changing your life in the ways you can.

Part of this process is trusting that you’ll write again. Mourning takes a long time. You need time to meet new people; to forget the pressure of performing for an audience. You need to become anonymous enough that you can re-meet yourself. Do the writing that feels like candy first. If at any moment you feel like doing work, don’t try to trammel over it. Honor the feeling and stop. When you think of writing as work, you’re doing it for other people. In order to write again, you need to do it so that it’s already a reward in itself.

We live more than one life. In fact, part of the work of living is closing off the paths we might take, whether it’s by choice or by fate. The thread of our lives is made by the paths we didn’t choose to take. A baby is born with innumerable paths in their life to come. A person on their death-bed is looking at the final path available to them, to step through the threshold of a journey unknown to the living. To be able to look back at that final moment and see the path one has chosen makes s life. Some are closed when we would have chosen them. Some are freely rejected. But all involve keeping on the path, getting to those other paths. Don’t be afraid. They’re waiting for you.

‘I’m Afraid I’m Not Going to Get Anywhere.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for all the thoughtful labour you have given to this newsletter. I enjoy every installment.

I am a few years out of my undergraduate degree, and have since been working a nine to five job to save money for a Master’s in Literature. During that time, I’ve had a handful of small poetry publications, put a lot of work into a novel, and tossed ideas around for several critical essays. Most of my close friends are in a similar situation – working, studying, or job-seeking full-time while engaging in creative work on the side.

My worry is that I am not prolific or talented enough to get anywhere with my writing. This has been compounded by the pandemic, which has had a severe impact on my productivity in both my job and my writing.

I see my friends repeatedly put their writing and criticism into the world for the joy of it, while I struggle to get anywhere without external pressure. I know that part of this is that they are, for the most part, self-publishing on newsletters and social media whereas I prefer to go via literary magazines. I still envy their drive and talent and worry that I lack it myself. This is in spite of me knowing rationally that we’re all just trying our best to get our fledgling careers going in a world that doesn’t reward this kind of work very well, and none of us is meaningfully ahead of the others. I want to be authentically happy for their successes and appreciate their work, not quietly resent them for it.

It doesn’t help that the state of the world currently has me severely doubting whether any of us will ever be able to build sustainable careers from our writing. I’ve made so much progress on my novel – which is looking to be a beast that will take me several more years to complete – yet can’t catch a glimpse of the finish line, let alone imagine what it looks like.

I feel I’ve lost faith in my ability to finish things and share them with the world. How do I set aside all this resentment and doubt and find the will to move forwards?

Sincerely,
Racing For Schroedinger’s Medal

United Kingdom

Dear RFSM,

I’d be willing to bet that the question at the end of your letter is haunting many others reading this today. We’re living through a catastrophe of a lifetime, one whose repercussions are as monumental as they are unknown. You know that literature has never been a stable option, but now you’re watching many more possible career paths, even previously guaranteed ones, slipping past the edge. You get to feel a bit uncertain. Uncertainty is the air around us.

I have bad news so I’ll front with it here: I don’t have a magic way to make that uncertainty go away. Doing away with it would require doing away with life itself right now. But what I can do is be your friend and share a bit of the hope I have on hand.

You and your friends are not alone in this model of working day and night to survive and seed your hopes for another life. For that’s what these side hustles are, aren’t they? They’re glimmers of the lives you actually want under the decades-old carpets of the lives you have.

Well, fifteen months of COVID-19 has brought the mold onto those tracts. Perhaps what was irritating before must now be dealt with. Perhaps you’ve been robbed of the resources you usually have to cope with resentment—remembering the mutual support of writing in cafes with those same friends, for example, or making a connection with a writer you admire at a reading you’ve attended. Perhaps your workplace has subtly asked you to take on more hours, not less, since you’ve been relieved of your commute. Perhaps you can’t grit your teeth through the day anymore. In small and large ways, perhaps you’ve had enough.

But enough of what? I’d like to know this too. Because from the tone of your letter, you sound burnt out. When I was in this state in the past, I couldn’t stop the negative thoughts from flying about the people around me. When I finally got around to writing, it was as if an invisible plug was blocking me from accessing my thoughts.

When you’re burnt out, you may want to hold generous feelings for your friends, but nothing comes out when you turn the spigot. You may want to write more and publish often, as the writing advice might have you do, but you find that you’re just too slow, at least slower than the writer friends around you.

Scarcity and uncertainty has left you with less energy and more fear. The meritocracy you may have grown up with teaches that if you’re going too slow, then you need to work harder to catch up. If you’re not performing to the standards you want, then it’s up to you to get it together and pull yourself up.

In a state of emergency, we might look to our left and right to watch how everyone else is putting on their life jackets. You might look to your friends because you’re tired and you wonder if anyone else is feeling this way. So how awful it must feel to look around and see your friends floating easily in the distance! Instead of commiserating with them about your common, fledgling careers, your meritocracy brain sees a new standard you must race to meet.

The problem is, you’re already running on empty. Your comparing yourself to your friends has the net effect of making you work harder when you most need rest. “Ignore that feeling! Refuse that pain! You’ll be able to rest if you just go a little further!” says the voice running laps around your inner monologue. And if you can’t? “Is that all you’re made of?” that voice might retort.

At the end of your letter, you explain that you’ve “lost faith in [your] ability to finish things and share them with the world.” In other words, you’ve lost faith in yourself, and I would venture to guess that you’re afraid that this is a permanent reflection of who you are and not just a result of the pandemic and a generational shift in wealth (see: the US boomer generation holds 70% of the national wealth here; millennials have 6% ). That’s meritocracy brain too.

You might imagine everyone as having the same life jacket, when the reality is that some people are treading water on a stray door while others can hop on their getaway yachts. The state of the world is not equal. It’s not your fault that all you got was this lousy door.

Which leads me to my larger point—you’re internalizing the inequities of the world as your own incapability to overcome. If you lionize the individualistic can-do attitude, you likely believe that these obstacles are personal challenges to test your resolve. Taking initiative to overcome obstacles is admirable, right? However, the can-doer may try to individually solve a problem as large as, oh, a historic shift in one’s national economy, stubbornly putting more and more energy into it, but they’ll never catch a break with an issue at that size. The constant problem-solving turns into anxiety. The anxiety turns into the sidelong glance at others and, with it, resentment for those who seem to be doing better.

But how do you know they’re doing better? Perhaps they’re self-publishing more frequently but secretly envy you, who’s publishing slowly in literary magazines and working on a novel, work that might pay off with the traditional publishing industry. Perhaps they’re self-publishing because they don’t believe they’re legitimate enough to try. Everyone is looking at each other, trying to figure out how to seem good. Your task now is look away so you can define what’s good enough for you.

RFSM, what you most need right now is your faith in yourself. You can’t just give yourself an “I believe I can do anything” sticker and get that over with—you need concrete proof that you can get the outcomes that you want. In other words, you need proof that you still have control over the things that matter to you.

Regaining control means scaling back from any goals that require other people and to look at the aspects of your life you can provide for yourself. While you were working day in and day out, what attention have you been able to play in the space you move through every day? Do you find delight in the food you’re making yourself? Have you done anything in the last week that brought you a new possibility for the pleasures of life?

Taking responsibility for your own life can have unintended (and painful) side effects at first. It requires you to face what you have chosen to make small. For me, I had to move through the grief of not being able to call home to ask about the proper rituals for cleaning a house. From there, I had to move through the unfairness of not getting the care I deserved. From there, I had to move through the pain of being all by myself.

It was years later that I could understand that I wanted shortcuts through this process and pursued those instead: I wanted a romantic relationship to distract me from my care; I wanted my career to take off so I could buy my happily-ever-after. I refused to take care of myself because a part of me was still making space for my family to reappear.

Having faith in myself meant confronting my grief. I had to grow, inch by inch, into the space I had left for my family. I learned, in that process, that pursuing success is a decoy from doing that work. Scaling back allowed me to fumble, but still do, the love I was learning to give myself.

All this doesn’t mean you can’t make larger goals. The older I get, the more I understand I have very little control over the goings-on of the world while also having, sometimes shockingly, a big role to play in it. The difference between what I believed then and what I believe now is how much I trust the element of surprise.

You can’t grasp the finish line of your novel because you’re not meant to see how it ends before it ends—there must be room for an unexpected turn, space for you to make a choice you couldn’t have seen in the outline. That’s us, you see, caught in the grip of life, moving through Sunday to Saturday.

This is true even for those of us who have written books before. As a writer, if I want to grow, the beginning of a new book is always a new way of writing. For that’s the thing—the things we held onto before the pandemic were worked for—stability doesn’t just happen out of thin air. It’s fought for; protested for; developed despite of and during the blank of a generational moment. It must happen—it will—if we want to get to our ends.

The world has ceased to model a way out of this uncertainty. So now it’s up to you. You can’t be sure of something you’ve never done, but you can turn toward those around you and notice your friends discovering new paths—not just paths of publication, but paths in how to live. You will need each other.

All of us are about to ask ourselves if we’re ready to make a life never taught to us, never shown us. It’s a life where you can’t trust a kind of sensibility in the world any longer. And it’s important to learn together, to find those who share what you really want, so you can take action for that future. Nothing’s guaranteed. And the things you do take for granted require a certain amount of faith because yes, it probably won’t be everything you want, but success might mean that it’s workable, good enough, and something we can all hold onto.

‘How Do I Write Without Being Pigeonholed?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I am a Chinese-born American (does the term CBA exist?? If not, you first saw it here!) who has recently found a little bit of success in getting some essays and short stories published, for which I’m very grateful. However, I’ve noticed a disconcerting trend—all my works that are being published (and if not published, receiving the most positive feedback from my writing group) are my “China” writing.

I’m really uncomfortable with making this distinction that I never used to make, but I can’t help becoming aware of it. My “China” writing are essays that explicitly highlights “Chinese” cultural beliefs and social phenomena, while my “non-China” writing are short stories that do not focus on those things, although they may still take place in China or have Chinese characters. Obviously, my “China” writing encompasses topics that are not unique to China, and my “non-China” writing can still involve elements specific to China and Chinese people. At least, that’s what I think, or used to think. I can’t tell anymore.

Ever since I’ve become aware of this trend, I’ve become increasingly awkward and paranoid when I write. I’m hyperconscious of any “China” elements in my writing. When they’re there, they feel like they’re artificially grafted on in order to make the work salable. When they’re not there, it feels like they’ve been artificially severed in order to test the quality of my writing minus the “China” bits.

Is my writing even any good? Am I just getting rewarded for selling exotic ware? A consistent feedback I get on my “China” stories is that they help my readers learn something they didn’t know about China. But I’m not a journalist or a folklorist or an anthropologist. I can’t do their jobs. If that’s how I’m being read, then I’m just a really terrible and unprofessional journalist/folklorist/anthropologist/et cetera. I’m also a little discouraged because I’ve always tried my best to not just record “China” stories, but to subvert, critique, or transform them. Also, maybe I’ve been misunderstanding the whole situation. Maybe I’m just a really bad fiction-writer and a great essayist. How can I seek to understand and negotiate this unhappy distinction I’ve learned to make? How can I get an accurate measure of my writing?

Much thanks,
Very Confused

Dear VC,

I laughed at loud at your first sentence—another “CBA” over here. Congratulations on these early publications. They will not be the last.

The letter you’ve written is not only something other CBAs might ask but also something I’ve heard from other queer writers. I would venture to guess that though the specifics are not the same, many marginalized writers would relate to this dance between writing fully as your own self and trying not to be pigeonholed based on identity stereotypes. How can you prevent your work from being used to further cultural imperialism? How do you determine whether you’re really a good writer or if you’re being tokenized? How do you write at all with a sense of freedom if your professional avenues are rife with reductive readings?

As I like to do, let’s start by going over the more obvious advice. I’ve written before that it’s incredibly important to allow yourself and your characters the complexity of experience you actually live or want them to be able to live. That is, the continual violence of stereotypes is the flattening of others’ imaginations and your own imagination of yourself. The world already does it to you—it’s imperative you resist doing the same.

I’ve also said before that in the face of racism, you should write what you want . If you’re stuck waiting for judgment from another person’s idea of “good,” especially if that goodness has been structurally defined by racism, you risk internalizing a rubric that never included you as fully human, let alone a writer.

In your letter, you mention starting to read your own work as though it was “grafted” with Chinese elements or editing those elements out entirely to see if it was still of any quality. These two perceptions sound familiar? You’re reading yourself with racist tropes, too, accusing yourself as either an ethnic writer making it solely through exotic pandering or a technically-perfect-but-never-authentic Asian, good at imitation but bad at soul.

I’m not saying this to blame you. You’re anticipating the racist ways you’ll be read in hopes you’ll be able to evade them. That’s a long-term trauma response: because you’ve survived up until this point by anticipating all the ways the future can go wrong, you’ve quickly studied up on this threat and you’re winding up on how to avoid it. Yet, perhaps the solution to your problems has often been becoming another person. And there’s no one in the world who can do your writing but you.

Your writing is an extension of yourself. You’re self-conscious that you’ve been giving off signals you never intended, and now you’re making changes to your work because you believe that you can control how others respond to your writing and therefore you. It’s understandable—the anxiety you’re trying to allay comes from a desire to exist as who you are, not what others foist upon you.

But the whole setup of racism is that it has nothing to do with you. It makes itself your business. It interrupts your normal flow of life and writing—it seeks to stymie and confuse you about what you mean. It impairs your judgment and seeks to replace it with racism’s lens. On systemic levels, as in the traditional publishing world, it seeks to replace your standards of excellence with its own. Don’t let it.

You’ve been taught all your life to look up to someone else to validate your goodness. This is how you’ve known to get love. You’re a humble student, not a teacher. With writing, this teacher manifests in audience—it’s not just the established journals you hope to publish with, the prestigious prizes that announce you’ve arrived, or the degrees that show you are employable, it’s also the checkmarks on your writing from your writing group telling you how their minds were blown by that one line; it’s also the number of followers you get on social media. It’s no wonder that you’re feeling anxious right now: your sense of validation is primed more to follow a corporate manager than guide you on your path as an independent writer.

With this new revelation, you no longer trust the world to reflect the quality of your writing. Without the world, who can you trust to help you grow into the writer you want to become? Without the world, who will love you when you become that self?

A sinister part of systemic racism in literature is the reduction not only of people’s humanity but of all our perceptions of who readers are. The literary world that only appreciates your “exotic teaching” doesn’t imagine a readership who already knows about those themes. Its lack of imagination signals to you that you, too, should not imagine that readership—a readership that would include you. You are the evidence of the mistake.

If you want a public career in the existing literary world, you can’t escape the fact that you will be misread, misunderstood, tokenized, and belittled just because of your byline and your appearance. This has happened to me in various ways in my career both by people who didn’t know me and people who were very close to me. You’re not being paranoid: it’s really happening and it happens all the time. The next part of the craft you develop will be the result of this negotiation.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you where to go from here. It’s a personal process that requires you to ask what kind of life you want to live and what values you hope to live out. It requires you to ask yourself what writing freely really means to you.

Every writer, no matter their identity, comes to an impasse with audience at one point. One wants to be read by people who understand the work; one wants to be understood. One wants to be recognized as good. One wants to be good. No writer comes to writing to be alone. But we are alone, eventually, and must learn to be, in order to do the work necessary. For the only way we can truly be understood is if we are determined to understand ourselves.

When I said “write what you want,” I am talking about your pleasure as the next arbiter of your work. That is, what would you write if your main audience was yourself? You don’t have to convince yourself that the Chinese elements in your writing were meant to “subvert, critique, and transform.” You don’t have to prove that you’re good enough for yourself. And if you do, why is that?

The life in writing gets shared with those who would find it life-giving, too. Part of that joy is writing with the right community. Not knowing the makeup of your writing group, I hope you’ll seek out at least one other writing partner who understands your Chinese elements from both an intellectual and emotional level. It’s likely this person would share your identity with you—maybe even another CBA. Sometimes the best feedback you can receive from your writing community isn’t how “good” or “publishable” something is, but how much it invites them to live.

Writing is an acknowledgement of humanity—not only of your own humanity but of the humanity of your reader. A good work reflects back to you your potential to be alive. It thinks you through your intellectual capacity, honors the fullness of your senses, projects visions of both your lineages and futures, and broadens your place in a community beyond space and time. When you write for yourself, this celebration is one and the same. The joy of writing for ourselves as audience is that we get to live twice. Not half-lives or part-lives as racism would have us accept, but more life than we even thought possible. Life that we get to give ourselves.

‘What Is a Writing Community, Anyway?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Your letters have really been helping me come to healthy terms with my relationship with reading and writing, particularly your letter on “How Do I Overcome My Inner Critic?” . I’m struggling right now, though, with the writing community and my relationship with that.

I came to writing comparatively late, and joined some workshops and writing groups because that seemed to be the thing to do. They helped me in the practical sense of forcing me to write frequently and read more, but there was this term that kept coming up: “the writing community”. But the thing is, I don’t know if I’ve ever belonged to one, or if I ever will, and it makes me lonely and scared. Lonely, because I wonder if there’s something wrong with me that I can’t seem to understand what exactly a “writing community” is, except that it connotes an in-group that I’m not a part of. Scared, because I have been told again and again that your success as a writer often depends on who you know in the “writing community”, and I don’t seem to have tapped into that.

John Taylor Gatto makes the distinction between communities and networks by acknowledging networks as a “splintering of identity”. That is, when one is working within a network, one suppresses all parts of themselves that do not have to do with the network’s interest for the sake of efficiency. Often, I feel that’s what the writing “community” is—a writing network. A place where “writers” come together, not people. I’m fine with that. It’s just another workspace. But then—why the talk about solidarity, or warmth, or care? Why call it a community? If I’m coming off as sour and resentful—that’s what I’m scared of, too. Maybe everyone is “in” on the community aspect, and there’s something wrong with me that I don’t see it as such, that I’m not welcomed to be a part of it.

If the “writing community” is really just a network, I’m fine being the way that I am: clocking in and out of classes, treating each one as a transactional space, taking breaks from it just like one takes time off work. But if it’s a community, then what am I doing wrong that I can’t see it as such? What is a writing community, anyway?

Thank you for your always thoughtful replies!

Sincerely,
The Outsider

Columbus, Ohio

Dear TO,

I wrote a whole letter written to you about the “writing community” and nepotism and just deleted it because, well, I could spend your Sunday morning reminding you of how influential prestige, capital, and inherited networks are in the writing industry and how well they disguise themselves as “community,” or I can tell you about the moments in my career when community has truly materialized for me and how to build one for yourself.

But let’s talk about you first. You mentioned in your letter that you came to writing on the later side and that you joined some workshops and writing groups because they seemed “the thing to do.” Then you got spooked by this repeated invocation of the “writing community,” a nebulous term that seemed to be networking in disguise at best, a real in-group that you didn’t belong to at worst.

When you wrote how you did the “thing to do,” I started wondering about the second half of that statement. What were you hoping to get out of doing “the thing to do?” Why was that valuable to you?

Perhaps you’re feeling tentative because this new foray into writing is a new identity you’re trying on, and you wanted to do it correctly. Perhaps writing feels good and authentic to you, and so your search for the thing to do was in hope of becoming more of a writer. Following what everyone else was doing perhaps got you more information about how to be a writer, but now you’ve hit a wall with this idea of community, and you feel unsure of how to proceed.

In the case of writing community, your loneliness seems to come from the fear that you’re not enough to become part of a community. You’re hyper-aware because you believe that being included necessitates imitating the right set of behaviors. That is, you don’t believe acting as yourself is enough for a community to materialize. And from there, you catastrophize—not only does no one want to be your friend, but you also won’t have a career, in the end.

Of course, you seem to know that your question is not actually about writing community. It’s about intimacy: both your fear and need for it. It’s about your fear that you won’t know anyone because no one wants to know you. It’s about your fear that you’re fundamentally out-of-sync, meant to orbit forever a little too far from where the action is happening. It’s about how you know in your head that you deserve to be known, but there’s a voice inside you that’s sure you’re not, always looking for examples to prove its point.

Depending on your appearance in the world, that voice might be your actual experience of living in society. Perhaps it’s not just a voice in your head. Perhaps it’s racism, it’s sexism, it’s transphobia—all these ugly patterns of neglect and outright violence that bigotry repeats and affirms. It’s others’ thoughtless and intentional actions that have told you that you’re not worth as much as other people; it’s others’ actions that tell you who you are to history.

Some of us have to optimize for maximum acceptance not because we value normality but because we’ve learned how to assimilate to survive. Definitions—and living by them—protect us from harm. But in order for the walls to be thick enough, this means you can only tolerate (and give) complete acceptance or complete abandonment.

When people get to know you, are they getting to know a character you constructed for them to enjoy rather than the person you actually are? Sometimes the real fear of loneliness is not the absence of others but the absence of your self, your ability to take on life as fully as others seem to be able to. Sometimes living by definitions forecloses the real intimacy you also want and deserve.

So what do you do? I’ve written before about loneliness , friendship , reading with love , and even a smidge on like-minded communities , but today I want to focus on what I believe are the most important aspects of building a community of any kind around you.

Let me be clear about this first: a writing community is just a community. And my community supports my career in ways that I never would have imagined possible, but they also support me in my life because writing is my life. The visible help I receive in the world is often only a fraction of the support I receive in the friendships they come from. It is an honor to know my friends enough to care for them. It is an honor to be listened to and to receive their care.

Community is actually quite simple. It is a matter of kindness, generosity, and surprise.

Kindness is about opening the door. Generosity is passing help through it. And surprise is the delight that builds only through others’ continued presence in your life and vice-versa.

Kindness, generosity—anyone can master these. Neither require a special knowledge or nature. Neither require a certain location or degree. And once you learn that your community exists in your own generosity of spirit, you will be surprised by how easy it is to move along and keep.

Kindness can be thoughtfulness in an email exchange. Kindness can be an invitation to tea. Kindness can be reaching out with a special tip about discount stores. Kindness can be leaving someone alone, even if you think you’d be great friends, until happenstance brings you together on equal terms.

Building community in this way is not fast and doesn’t produce direct results. Point A doesn’t always get to point B. Instead, I’m choosing people, not job titles or mastheads, which change often enough anyway. In friendship, the doors must open both ways. You and someone else at two sides of opposite walls can only be bound by a decision to open your doors to each other.

If kindness means opening the door, generosity means getting to know each other not to know what you can extract from each other but what you can do, particularly, to take care of each other.

I choose my literary community—my friends—based on who I like, not because I want something from them. Our mutual generosity is possible because our relationships are not based on the favors we can do for each other.

While there is no “thing to do” with kindness, there is the practice of taking stock of what you can give—not what you can sacrifice—and offer that to everyone you meet, no matter how insignificant their stature or unlike you they seem. Allow people to surprise you. Don’t offer what you don’t have to give, but give more than is expected when you can.

It may be that you are not used to practicing kindness, especially toward yourself. For kindness is also the practice of looking at yourself not with an extractive eye but one that asks: “Who is there? How can this person feel loved? And can I do anything to help them?”

It is easier to start with asking this question about others. See who responds to your kindness. So many of us move through the world with caution because we fear revealing our dysfunction—dysfunction that will ultimately lead a new friend, a new lover, to abandon us (or so we believe). Kindness is disarming. Kindness is suspicious because it’s so often appropriated for profit.

See who responds to kindness because so many of us are waiting for the opportunity to offer it in-kind but don’t know “the thing to do” for you just yet. So many of us are just as lonely as you are, waiting for someone else to reach out. Give someone else the opportunity to connect in the way you wish someone had given you.

If you’re just at the beginning of building friendships, you must prioritize friendships that respond to you with generosity. Prioritize the friendships that surprise you with their kindness, that fill your bowl rather than deplete it. Only with the love of other people can you build the space you need to love others who, for one reason or another, can’t yet respond generously to you.

Those who can’t give back in one moment may come back to you when they can, but never depend on it. Give what you have to give and don’t look back. Allow yourself to be surprised and delighted when it does return to you.

The right community will not only support you but will teach you reasons to love yourself beyond what you ever could have imagined. These friends will teach you, again and again, why they support and love you. If you choose the right ones, you’ll learn from them the notions you need to love yourself. Love as in asking people to stick around. Love as in realizing they already are.

‘Is Choosing to Stick to “Westernized” Tropes Also a Form of Freedom?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for your letters—reading them has been a bright spot for me this year.

I’ve been mulling over your advice in “How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?” and “Can My Novel Include a Country’s Stereotype Responsibly?” —in particular, “write what you want.” As an Asian-American writer, I’ve struggled with motivation to research and write about my family’s culture precisely because of the reasons pinpointed by you and the original letter-writers. Although my stories always deal with some sort of marginalization and characters who look like I do, I naturally gravitate toward “Western” (to be reductive) storytelling methods and tropes. Compared to several of my Asian-diaspora writing friends, it’s difficult for me to get invested in re-learning my milk tongue, exploring “non-Western” story structures, or becoming an expert—again, that expectation for marginalized writers to hold twice the knowledge—in my parents’ or grandparents’ cultures and mythologies, because I feel like they do not truly belong to me.

I often write in direct response to the stories that resonate with me or make me angry. However, I’m aware that the ways in which I respond, as well as the stories I continue to seek out and the satisfaction I feel in writing them at all, have been tuned primarily by the American, British and (not enough) Asian diaspora works that have most moved me.

So my questions are: is choosing to stick to “Westernized” tropes (with a sprinkling of diaspora feelings and the yearning for belonging) also a form of freedom? Or is it a loss by way of colonialism and imperialism? Or both? What responsibility might I have as an Asian-American to attempt to build some immense body of knowledge on my family members’ culture, if at all?

Thank you so much for your time!

Sincerely,
Daunted by Possibly Assigned Readings

Dear DPAR,

Thank you for writing this letter and for your existing engagement with my previous letters. I must admit, I myself have been daunted by yours for the past several weeks. There is, always, the fear that I will say something horribly wrong, but it is more that I’ve wondered deeply, for so long, about the answer to this question myself: there is so much that I don’t know where to start. Consider this letter not my last word on the subject, but a moment of reflection that I hope will lend you some answers, or, even better, some questions that can guide you a little further down your path.

My immediate answer to your question is that in writing, you are only responsible to yourself. Of course, if I ended this letter at that, you would not be satisfied at all. This is because the implicit question of your letter is not about how or what you should write—it’s caught up in these other questions: who are you? Where do you belong? And how would you belong there, if you got that far?

You’re asking these questions because you’ve woken up from your compulsory re-education up until this point. Perhaps your school curriculum advanced racist interpretations of Asian Americans—perhaps it never included us at all. US and European authors may have been held up as the pinnacle of progress and enlightenment in literature, not authors who looked like you. Now you’ve become aware of these things, to the point where your social and literary world are telling you the opposite: that Asian diasporic works are good and pleasure in the colonial and imperialist education you received is bad. In other words, you’ve gone from one belief-system of good and evil, where English is good and Asian is bad, to another one where Asian is good and English is bad.

On paper, the choice seems clear. The US and Europe have wrought centuries of violence across the rest of the world, directly affecting you and your ancestors. You, in your own way, already respond to this. Yet, your letter indicates that you’re feeling inadequate. You have qualms with writing on or from your identity, and when you look to take on more of your parents’ and grandparents’ cultures and mythologies, “they do not truly belong to [you].” You’re somehow thwarted in an attempt to join your friends and family. You’re not really sure you want to.

On the other hand, you may have absorbed the tired story of how cultural authenticity is nurtured into you: that parents teach the child what there is to know about the world, passing on languages, myths, and recipes. Your feelings may believe this story even when your mind knows it’s a little more complicated: maybe your caregivers, having to work double-time to earn their security as immigrants, did not have time to teach you much at home. Perhaps they neglected this purposefully, hoping you’d be better off if you were more Americanized. Maybe you never learned those myths or refused to, understanding even at a young age that broadcasting your difference in a racist society led to a kind of violence.

So you don’t quite fit into the American dream, but you also don’t fit into the story of your difference. Nevertheless, you feel pressure to take on these models of being in order to become recognizable.

David Eng and Shinhee Han write about one angle of this in Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation [1],

Asian Americans are forced to mimic the model minority stereotype in order to be recognized by mainstream society—in order to be, in order to be seen at all. […] For Asian Americans, mimicry is always a partial success as well as a partial failure into regimes of whiteness.

You probably see yourself as the sole actor here—with the historical and social consequences of compulsory education and assimilation in the background. But these racist institutions and experiences have shaped the way you approach your problems now. Building off Eng and Han’s research on mimicking the model minority stereotype as both “partial success” and “partial failure ,” perhaps the violence of colonization doesn’t live in the what being written, but in the outlook from which you write.

That outlook is what I’ll call the position of the decentered writer. The decentered writer has been taught that they are not the source of expertise, so they constantly look outward in a search for their own authenticity. The decentered writer has gradually been pushed further into the margins of their own consciousness; someone who has been mandated to choose between many bodies of knowledge, none of which include a story lived by the writer themself.

The decentered writer’s knowable world does not include the writer’s experience. The poetic strategies and trajectories of that life are, at best, precarious assimilations, following Eng and Han, never to be fully successful. The decentered writer has been mandated to become another person in order to belong. By design, they will always fail. By design, they will never belong.

To put it another way, you live out your life in a story that doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t exist, you can’t be a character. If you can’t be a character, you can’t know any words. You can listen and even understand other people’s stories, but you don’t have one of your own. Any attempt to adopt another can feel like an awkward costume, a silly charade.

It is taken for granted that the decentered writer possesses the “pure” knowledge of the margins from which they appear, and that is the cultural product they are expected to mine for the benefit of neoliberal multiculturalism. But historical trauma doesn’t work like that. My mind trails to Eng and Han’s summary of Rea Tajiri’s documentary, History and Memory (1991) [2]:

History and Memory is about a young Japanese American girl whose parents endured internment during World War II. Whereas the girl’s mother has repressed all memories of the internment experience, the daughter has nightmares that she cannot explain—recurring images of a young woman at a watering well. The daughter is depressed, and the parents argue over the etiology of her depression. Eventually, the daughter discovers that these nightmares are reenactments of the mother’s histories in camp. Ironically, the mother has history but no memory, while the daughter has memory but no history. For both mother and daughter, history and memory do not come together until the daughter visits the former site of the internment camp, Poston. There she realizes that it is her mother’s history that she remembers.

Memory is a funny thing. For those of us who inherit historical traumas, we remember without knowing why we remember. We remember without knowing. Domination doesn’t just take land or livelihoods—it takes language. It takes home. It takes a sense of belonging. Those who have descended from survivors harbor the psychic casualties of cultural warfare; casualties of the idea that it’s “cheaper to give them education than to fight them” [3]. Our unknowing is political. It is like that by design.

The reality of the matter is that you’re an amalgamation of your inheritances and your experiences. You’ll never succeed in the dichotomies you’ve set for yourself because you are a little of both. By looking to these blanket ideas of racialized good and evil as the standard of your worthiness, you deny a part of who you are in the name of the “greater good.” In turn, you will always see yourself only as a “partial failure” and “partial success.”

To be responsible to yourself means to acknowledge what you have lost: to uncouple your face from the face of the wound. What survives in the decentered writer is desire—a yearning for that which we are missing. It is not so much a choice as you frame it but the struggle to know at all. Memory survives in slant through our wordless bodies and inexplicable dreams. The story isn’t laid out logically, but the decentered writer might make out the characters, refill their speech bubbles. To honor yourself is also to honor your inheritances and associations. You are, in fact, part of a collective history. Each decentered writer has a different way in. For we need entire generations to weave this broken but growing tapestry of lost knowledge.

You cannot escape your inheritances. Nor can you abandon them. Home is not inherent in those books that moved you in your years growing up. Home is not inherent in your friends’ knowledge or your parents’ myths. Home is made by you. Knowledge does not hold home in and of itself: you are the one creating where you belong by allowing yourself to belong there. By allowing a piece of the world to belong to you. The selves we were will never leave us, our movements ghosted by our ancestors moving with us. You will find them where you find yourself.

Notes

[1] David Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation . Duke University Press, 2018, p. 45.

[2] Ibid., pp. 50-51.

[3] https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation

‘I Have a Big Pile of Writing. Now What?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

As I am writing to you I am staring at all my notebooks, neatly organized in a shelf across from my living room table where I am seated - notebooks filled with journal entries and random written materials which I have produced throughout the years. Lots and lots of them! But I never really open them. I know that I could probably try to publish something autobiographical, an auto-ethnography of sorts, but I never get to actually sift through all the materials and rewrite it. The same goes for the files in my computer (I do prefer writing by hand though, so most of my material is on paper). Any tips on how to go about this? It feels so daunting. I have no idea where to start. Am I the only one who writes and writes and then....never does anything about it? Greetings from snowy Denmark.

Sincerely,
Rosa Rosae

Copenhagen, Denmark

Dear RR,

Greetings, too, from a snowy place across the ocean. I want to say congratulations first on cultivating a writing practice that has allowed you to get all that material down—it’s a huge part of the process.

From your letter, it seems as though you’re ready to dive back into this writing you’ve been doing for quite some time. You know that you “could probably try to publish something” from it, but something has gotten in the way of your doing it. Whenever I hear of a fellow writer with this sort of block, I urge them, as I urge you, to take some time to ask yourself why you’ve avoided getting to your notebooks up until this point.

You mention that it feels “daunting” and that “you have no idea where to start.” Check in with yourself before proceeding, too. Hesitance is also a kind of self-protection. Were there difficult times wrapped in those years you were writing? Do you have the emotional tools to confront them? Are you afraid that no matter the volume of notes you made, you’ll hate what you find and feel discouraged from moving on?

I, too, write mainly be hand. The bulwark of my forthcoming book, Dream of the Divided Field , came from a notebook that I had written during a difficult summer. It took me a full year to revisit it. Take care with your fears and, while you need not obey them, consider why they’re there. Clarity around them will only help the next part of the process.

You probably wrote these notebooks without thinking about them as drafts at all. This mindset probably gave you confidence and lowered the stakes enough for you to be quite prolific. Now that you realize you “could probably publish something,” you’ve gone from thinking of your notes as complete play to a potential completed work. In other words, your notebooks are now a project, and you’ve put your project hat on. But perhaps these notebooks seem uncontrollable, unwieldy, even. You haven’t found your way “in” to the project per se—you might be daunted by the lack of a conceptual backbone, a discernible path.

If you’ve been writing for a while or just have gone through a creative writing institution, you might notice that often-times the process is divided between generating and shaping your work. There’s the “shitty first draft” and then the molding of it, as the usual writing advice goes. Perhaps this comes from the usual divide in writing workshops, where the new piece gets immediately commented on and shaped by a “public” of classmates.

It seems to me quite a hurried process—more interested in saleable 50-word concepts than 50,000-word books, or, more interested in the production of the words than the actual insights of the words. And like everything else in our lives, we writers are taught to start with a concept and then live up to it, rather than the other way around. This, to me, is the biggest weakness of contemporary books today: that book ideas are optimized for grant proposals, comps, and soundbites. The writing is overdetermined, edited to the line of its predetermined theme, and never has space to explore what it could become.

My suggestion for you, RR, is not to swing from “something” to concept just yet. I implore you to resist, even, thinking of these notebooks as an “auto-ethnography.” Rather than writer or editor, I suggest that you act in a role in-between: as a reader.

As a reader, you become a witness to your archive. We are constantly remaking ourselves in our writing—writing is just the fragments of how we experience being alive, pieced together over and over again like images in a dream. Gradually, the regular images and metaphors change. You’ve collaged yourself into a different person. But the process in which this happens is barely perceptible until you have a means of looking back, like through your notebooks.

A version of you wrote those notebooks, but you are no longer that same person. Time has given you distance. Time has given you the opportunity to approach yourself as a like-minded stranger, a soulmate of sorts. Time has given you yourself, your own best reader.

Imagine yourself as a reader and the work before you as the new exhibit or book you’re getting to see in someone else’s private archive. You already know how to do this: as you encounter a flash of insight or interest, copy down what resonates for you or respond to it. Take your shelf one book at a time, one entry at a time. Give yourself plenty of space to think with your past self, have conversations, and see what you still have in common.

The reader will jot down favorite lines. Respond to whole passages that are electrifying and, likely, didn’t seem quite as exciting at the time. I learn this lesson myself again and again, both in photography and writing: it’s rarely the photos or drafts I thought were “brilliant” that shine bright in hindsight. It’s often the absent-minded shot or those passing thoughts I hastily jotted down, mildly interesting then, that bear kernels of insight I feel compelled to answer in the present.

You will not copy down, say, the entries that embarrass you, or that include to-do lists. But pretend you are speaking and reading the work of another person. You are at your own personal archive of the world. Treasure the privilege of this private exhibition.

Remember, RR, you’re just reading your own notebooks. The writing should not be “productive,” but loosely cultivated. If you pay attention, you will notice what holds your attention and, in time, some themes will accumulate in the process. This writing you’ve done is a memory map, an opportunity for encounter. For the truth is, even if you were writing toward a larger idea, you’re already a different person from the writer who was writing then. But by reading, you discover the overlap.

Writing is a kind of memory-work. We leave trails and marks on our way through our lives, but time weathers our way-finders; new growths overcome our former sites. We hope, when we return someday, that some fragments will lead us back to those vistas and caves: those secrets of inspiration. Yet, it would be foolish to keep what we don’t want or to expect to retain what we didn’t choose at the time.

Like watching sunlight shift across a forest floor, we do not capture a self as we write. We capture our changes, made possible by time. As you write in the present, you are also anticipating the future: the moment you return to the ruins of who you’ve been: who you thought you were, who you wanted to be. Tell me, what has come to pass? And what will you write now that it already has?

‘Can I Quit My Day Job?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I have been cobbling together a creative writing life / education / community outside of work for several years now. Maybe the pandemic has accelerated this feeling but working during the day and writing around that...I am so tired of doing it and I don’t want to do this anymore. Sometimes I think come on you, what’s another year or two more while you continue to polish your pieces, send them out, while you work on a book length collection. At other times I think goddamn it, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to keep living these two lives that feel one so mercenary and the other genuine, interesting, difficult, inspiring, but real and what I actually want to do. If I don’t invest seriously with my time in the thing I care about now, then when?

Sometimes I just want to quit my day job. Sorry, when I say sometimes, I mean every day I feel the wrongness of sitting at my computer doing the things that I do. Previously, I’ve felt in my day job that I need to at least prove to myself that I can do this too, but I’ve been promoted, I’ve switched companies, and I’ve done well enough, but now I’m still here doing the same thing. Recently, this feeling of weariness has morphed more into a slow dripping sadness. I am willing myself every day to keep doing the work I do in the daytime. Having had a week and a half off during the holidays, it was amazing how much clearer my thoughts were by the end, how having the freedom to read and research generates so many more thoughts, ideas, writing snippets, the beginnings of pieces.

I’m not even sure what I’m asking here. Maybe it’s permission to quit, but then what? I write poetry and creative nonfiction, and they hardly feel like places where it’s easy to carve out a living. I guess I’m just tired of splitting my life in two, the practical and the fanciful. I want my writing life to be my real life, my main life. How does one grapple with the realities of capitalism while having dreams of being a storyteller and living within reasonable means too?

Maybe what I’m asking is how long do I still have to do it like this for? It takes time to write even one good poem, one finished polished essay. I fear that at this pace of working on writing, plus working, it’s going to take me years to get a substantial body of writing together and out into the world. I want to write well, because I enjoy thinking, observing, feeling, reflecting. And I want to not live in a cardboard box or move in with my parents. Is that asking for too much? The cautious and responsible part of me reminds me to continue working on my writing and have patience. And part of me feels that I can’t stomach waiting around half investing in my passion for that much longer. The frustration is getting more frequent.

You’ve worked in tech for a period yourself while writing before/after work. I know it’s responsible to keep doing what I do for now, saving, paying the rent, etc but I want to know what other ways out there exist. I know you’ve written about improvising to find solutions on that front yourself, and that The Reading is one creative way of creating income while creating writing that you believe in. I just look around and the alternatives don’t seem that great. And that makes me feel stuck. But continuing on my current path is not sustainable either.

Sincerely,
Frustrated Artist Working Full Time

New York, NY

Dear FAWFT,

Quit your job.

If you really have the option of quitting your job, quit your job. What makes it an option? If quitting your job won’t put you on the streets within a month; if quitting your job won’t put you in a physically or emotionally dangerous situation that could end in severe mental breakdown or physical danger; if quitting your job won’t get in the way of your being able to eat; if quitting your job won’t eliminate your access to healthcare. If quitting your job won’t get in the way of your finding manageable solutions to any of these possible problems (e.g. state-sponsored healthcare).

The worst-case scenario you outlined in your letter was moving in with your parents, which makes the possibility of you ending up in a cardboard box rather improbable. Your not mentioning any of the above scenarios as a logical consequence makes me believe that it’s not likely they are concerns and therefore unlikely to happen, too.

I had a feeling I would tell you to quit your job by the end of your first paragraph because you yourself said “I can’t do this anymore.” Even though you also said, in your second paragraph, that you feel wrong sitting at your desk all day and that your “weariness has morphed into a slow dripping sadness,” which reinforce your conclusion, your thoughts didn’t end at what you wanted. You second-guessed and third-guessed yourself. The rest of your letter you were searching for a question, perhaps wondering if you wanted my permission or some thought on what might happen afterward, but your search for a question is a decoy, an overrun thought. You have your conclusion. But you don’t know how to respond to your unhappiness.

Quit your job because everyone who has a choice in the matter should quit a job that is making them unhappy. The same company you’ve stayed late for, for which you’ve compromised your ethics or your sense of value, sometimes for decades, will still forget about your promotion or lay you off if they have to for their bottom line.

For many of us, myself including, unhappiness is a byproduct of getting somewhere else, not a real enough reason to change course. If you wanted to get to college, you had to get good grades; if you wanted to get a good job, you had to turn in that essay or pass that test; if you wanted to live happily ever after, you had to weather through your partner’s abusive behavior. You temper your unhappiness with the certainty of happiness on the horizon.

I know this because you’ve described your options as two extremes—live a materially comfortable life in the lap of a 9-5 or live an inspired life as an artist in a dilapidated warehouse. There are far many more variations in between. I have friends who have day jobs, but they require far less effort and time because they are part-time or with strict work-life boundaries, leaving them space to write. I have many who teach; others who ghostwrite or write cultural commentary. I have other friends who chose to go to graduate schools that provide low but livable stipends; still others have been gifted time by partners and families. I myself saved money and changed my living costs.

Quit your job, but whether you transition into full-time writing, get another job that is more fulfilling for you, or something else, remains to be seen. What does it mean to live a good life? How do you know how to reach it? You’ve been marketed some ideas by your family, your friends, and our society. And you second-guess yourself with those ideas (and their judgments) too. But what might it look like for you?

Perhaps you need security. Perhaps you need a certain level of material comfort. Perhaps your variation of being an artist will include another day job, but one that doesn’t leave you sick to your stomach every time you show up. You won’t know what you’re capable of by stagnating at this dead-end. If you want to know more about the possibilities of your life, you have to try new things, even new lives.

Having resources does strange things to our brains. Your lifestyle swells to the size of your paycheck. No matter how much you have, you either worry about losing it or need more of it. Having more signifies that you’re making progress in your life. Letting go of possessions, of one life as you lived it, can feel like a reversal. You might worry that you’ll never get this life back. You might worry that you’ll prove that you don’t have what it takes to be an artist.

These are all possible. When I first quit my job, I gave myself a runway of one year to get financially stable. One year has become two and, after this year, I have decided to stop counting. My life is much smaller. The income I’m earning is not enough to stop the slow drip of my savings. I’ve floated the possibility of returning to tech. I’m teaching. I’m writing this newsletter. I’m fortunate to have gotten a fellowship at the time I did. I don’t want to stop writing books and that’s still financially possible for me. And for now, that’s enough.

If you want to be a full-time writer, you have to be comfortable with uncertainty. You have to be comfortable with the idea that you won’t know where your next paycheck is coming from—if your next book will sell or if you got that fellowship or adjunct class. You have to be comfortable with things not going according to plan: you won’t get the job or the fellowship, your advance, after fees and taxes, will not be as high as you thought it would be, or your yearly royalties, rather than a stable monthly income, will barely buy you some nice takeout once a year.

I can’t tell you what a good life looks like, FAWFT. I can only assure you that anyone who wants a life where their own wants and opinions matter must act on behalf of themselves. I can only assure you that acting for yourself means exposing yourself to uncertainty, risking a present self to find your limitations and capabilities.

A good life isn’t executed like a plan: it’s carved out by decisions, risks, failures, and illuminations. You will remake your life again and again. I can only assure you that when you find your good life, it’s going to feel good. This good will not feel fleeting or temporary. It will not be loud, most likely. It will be worth whatever risk you’ve taken to learn what it is.

‘My Two Books Failed, But I Don’t Know How to Move On.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

After the publication of my first book—a chapbook, well received and successful by my modest standards—I spent the next six years writing, revising, and submitting two books that I now believe will not be published. These were tumultuous years for me, personally, politically, and artistically. My children were very young, my partner was, at times, very ill, and an election unsettled me deeply and called me to new kinds of labor and activism. I poured my emotional energy into writing in ways that were new to me. I wrote in new genres and new registers and often felt like I was really finding my way in the dark. I was able to reduce my paid work so that I could focus on writing. Though both books were close to publication through various channels, it never happened. After extended periods of complimentary rejection and finalist status, I just want to work on and believe in something new. But it’s hard to re-enter that state of belief that this thing I’m working on will someday be read. I have now, recently, been wrong about that twice. I feel haunted by the experience of having written and abandoned these books when I wrote them so earnestly and so hard. I believe I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been, but I don’t know how to move on again without some hope that this new project might connect.

Sincerely,

Starting Over & Over & Over
Portland, Oregon

Dear SOOO,

Your question comes to me while we are at opposite ends of the writing process. I think I am close to finishing a book. You are starting a new one. But soon I will be where you are, asking my life again what it asks of me.

Your situation, of course, is different from mine. You’ve written not one, but two books, and as much as you’ve rallied and held out hope for their acceptance, perhaps listening to all those who explain that publication is a “numbers game,” your intuition tells you that it’s time to give up. The problem, it sounds, is that you’re not quite ready to do that.

You’ve written to me at an impasse of hope. When your life bequeaths such an impasse to you, it behooves you to listen. You may not get another chance for a while.

I am being fully woo-woo about this and you may even be annoyed with this response. I assure you, when this happens to me, I do not feel grateful for the universe’s message. I get frustrated; I go kicking and screaming. In fact, I was doing just that for most of the past two months. It is only on the other side now that I can say this to you with such calm.

SOOO, I can tell that you’re ambitious. You tell me that these past six years have been tumultuous for you—attending to the needs of your children, caring for your sick partner, and caring for the world at large. Your ambition and optimism show in how you wrote two books anyway—books that, according to you, pushed you further out from your usual registers and genres. Books, as you said, that were all about “[finding] your way through the dark.”

You worked hard. You’ve done what I often tell others to do in these letters, making space in your work life for these dreams to happen. You were earnest, perhaps, because you felt that the work you were doing was new and exciting to you, even you at your most genuine. You believed the work was inspiring because it inspired you. Perhaps the modest success of your chapbook—however you are measuring it—set the tone for what felt possible. It makes your close misses, which are usually hopeful, difficult rejections to swallow.

I hear, loud and clear, how you can’t do it again. Something’s holding you back from getting on with it: you feel guilty for abandoning these other two books. Perhaps you are also exhausted this time—psychically and physically. You can’t muster the strength to hold your breath, pull it all together again, and start a new practice; a new book; a new hope. To plumb even further into yourself and your work. How much longer, you may be wondering, do you have to find your footing in the dark? At a certain point, it doesn’t seem fair. At a certain point, the hope’s not there.

At the beginning of one’s writing life, hope comes from what is not yet done. Empty space, as I wrote to NTBAM last week, is vast and unarticulated. It swims with possibility. There is no limit to what can happen. So you imagine your life without limitations. And how motivating is that?

Before I published my first collection, I often heard that I would likely write more, but that I only get one first book. One chance to make the splash that would draw attention to your work for the rest of your career. One chance to set the tone of your reputation—your style, your voice, your concerns. At the same time, if you’re lucky, you’ll also have people cheering you on: some people who love your poems about X, others who love your writing about Y. Your dreams will multiply with their influence, for your avenues of success will seem various and long.

But you can get lost in the dreams of that primordial soup. Dreams are ambitious because they are certain. In them, household chores have been done; the years spent working have already passed; the rewritings dissolve beneath final versions. Dreams can be summarized into stories. Lives cannot.

Dreams had are not dreams realized. And the realizing part is perhaps the most painful not only because of how we disappoint ourselves with our work, but also because there is no certainty in achieving what we are trying to achieve. Ambition can bring focus and tenacity, but it is the view from the summit, not the steps you take getting there.

Although you’ve already scaled two boulders, you’re now staring at a slab of rockface, unable to see a grip. You are at an impasse, but the work of an impasse isn’t getting over it. The work of the impasse is understanding why you’re being held here. Perhaps the universe knows you don’t give yourself stillness, so it’s taken matters into its own hands.

Before you can move on, SOOO, you have to ask yourself what these two books really mean to you. Were they your companions over these past six years? Places of joy, of comfort, of discovery, when the needs of others overcame your own? Or were they the first steps you took to saying what you meant, not following what you were expected to? Did they count as victories even if your ambition can’t account for them?

At the first accounting of success, your standards were “modest.” You tempered your expectations while your ambition is large, so your hope is stuck on what seems large next: a reading public as big as the world. But a reading public can’t experience the years you groped through the dark. A reading public can’t fathom what you chose to do in order to find your way. Just because the public, your colleagues, or even your family can’t see the value in what you’ve done doesn’t make what happens to you and only you any smaller in proportion. A reading public can’t tell you that you are good as you are. A reading public can’t tell you that you’re not.

The measure of your life must be in proportion to your self. So too is the work you do. Much of what happens is invisible, even to ourselves, until the universe demands that we pay attention. It may not be that you’re meant to get to the top of this mountain with these books, but neither books nor mountains are done with you. What you did together will stay with you forever.

When you are always moving forward, you forget to remember. What have you learned about your practice as a writer? What did they give you that is worth grieving now? Something is calling you back to where you started. Look from where you are. Retrace your steps. It is only in returning to the beginning can you truly appreciate how far you’ve gone.

‘How Do I Rediscover the Joy of Writing?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I really liked the last answer you gave regarding goodness and the idea of being good enough . I have a related question - how do you stop judging your writing with a harshly critical eye and learn to nurture it with gentleness and tenderness? How do you rediscover the joy of writing and escape from the restrictive gaze of (self-inflicted) judgment and criticism?

I think a lot of writers, especially when we were young, wrote because it was fun and pleasurable. At least that was the case for me years ago. Now that I’m older and getting back into it, I notice that while I’m occasionally able to tap into the same feeling of freedom, play, and discovery I felt in my youth, such moments are fleeting and I often feel myself judging every word as soon as it lands on the page and every sentence as soon I close it with a period. Writing under so much self-imposed scrutiny has fostered a lot of insecurity and limited my creativity and output. I’m getting into meditation and mindfulness and all that so I’m definitely aware of when I’m being excessively harsh on myself, yet I’m unable to put a decisive lid on such behavior. I know I can’t expect to free myself from negative thoughts or habits overnight, and that some criticism can be healthy. Still, I’m wondering if you have some techniques or wisdom to share on this topic!

Sincerely,
Not The Best At Mindfulness

Dear NTBAM,

I spent some time getting to your letter because I had a few others that asked, partially, the same question you had about quelling the inner critic . You mention that you’ve been taking on meditation and mindfulness, which is a great first step to understanding that critical voice. I’ve also found therapy to be a helpful space to work out those knots—writing likely just happens to be one net for those negative thoughts to proliferate.

Now, I’m going to respond to your question about joy in writing through the overloaded talisman of the blank page. I’ve read in countless author interviews over the years about the torture of the blank page and the torture of writing. There’s all this talk, too, about how one only needs to show up for the blank page and the words will flow—which is it?

The blank page is not just a blank page. Written on it, in invisible ink, are all the assumptions you have brought to writing as work.

My partner and I are both fantasy lovers, so this spring we watched The Magicians . At one point on the show, the protagonists read a book of fate and notice that there’s a great blank spot. Fate ends there, and I thought to myself—what would I do if my fate ended at a great blank spot too? Then I remembered that with as much saving and planning I could muster, I had left a secure, well-paying full-time job in 2019 to pursue writing. I didn’t have to speculate. I was already sitting in that blank spot.

This week, over the phone, I explained to my editor that although I am the type to instantly respond to emails or get tasks over with as they come in, my work as a writer is not like that. It is more like watching a shaggy mass of dough rise overnight. It is bread, but it is not yet bread. And no staring on my end has anything to do with the shape it will take on the counter, then in the banneton, then in the oven. The bread will become itself. I just need to play my part.

At the time that I left tech, I didn’t believe this. I believed that writing is work and everything I learned about optimizing work, I brought to my writing.

At the beginning of my great blank spot, I started a Kanban board to track all of my writing work (Kanban is a project management methodology I learned on the job as an engineer). Reading a book or finishing a draft would yield a certain number of points. Soon, I was spending more time updating, organizing, and moving my progress cards than doing any sort of real writing. I rushed through books to get more points in. As for writing? Forget it. It was never predictable enough for my project management software, which also measured “volatility” of my points from week-to-week. I simply couldn’t finish writing tasks at a regular pace.

The Kanban board was just a manifestation of that will to optimize. Fundamentally, I wanted every word I wrote to be usable and flawless. I wanted the sentences to come out exactly right, or for the first drafts of poems to be the final drafts.

I didn’t like the feeling of failure, so I avoided it. I believed that self-surveillance was good, because surveillance was how capitalist interests had always coerced me to do my “best” work. Without surveillance, how would I measure success? More importantly, without surveillance, how would I prevent myself from predicting and avoiding failure? Failure I could not optimize. Failure I could not improve.

This is, of course, because I had never dealt with failure. I had never acknowledged my own record of wasting time as a writer. I was talented, so I wrote only when the mood struck, when inspiration hit, and more than likely whatever I wrote would be good, or at least good enough, to never revise again. In my mind, I never failed, nor did I waste time. Failure was wastage. Failure meant I had lost control of my time and therefore my life.

Perhaps intellectually we both know the capitalist notion of success, also known as victory, “winning,” or whatever the militaristic term it is today, is not only corporate slogan but also embedded in our models of normativity. “Success” is to be normal, and if you are not normal, then you better be successful.

Even now, it takes conscious effort for me not to write this letter to you from top to bottom, beginning to end. I am writing it, paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, out of order, following my thoughts as they appear rather than how I want them to appear.

Personhood, good personhood, lies in “succeeding” at normal life—I cannot simply be a man; I must succeed at being a man in order to be called a man. I cannot be a writer; I must succeed at being a writer. Once I am categorized in gender, race, body, and nationality, I can be measured to succeed at those identities.

Finding blankness in one’s life is not a matter of finding a blank page. Finding blankness—finding silence—is an active task. Real blankness must be created.

Actively doing nothing, resisting the urge to do anything—do you find yourself fidgeting? Thinking of the next problem or task you have to get done? Creating nothing, as you are probably learning in meditation, is the process of letting those urges flow through you without any action.

Because, let’s be frank: you are no longer a child. You have responsibilities. You need to provide for at least yourself in a capitalist society. For however long you’ve been in school, at least how long you’ve been an adult within capitalism, you’ve internalized the relationship between productivity and success, success with social validation and the security of your basic needs.

Like life as you know it, the blank page is not neutral. You’ve been raised in a world where blank space is a thing to be filled up, conquered, and then optimized. Much like the privatized commons, the blood-turned lands of settler-colonial states, and enslaved bodies, blankness has been the justification for extraction until destruction.

What happens to us in the disappearance of space? We no longer look at space as space, but as something wrong: a failure of optimization or even imagination. As astrologers like to say, “as above, so below.” If you remember your childhood, you’ll remember that it was once an open space, but also that it was filled with activity—joy, as you called it.

You can choose, however, to create nothing. Creating nothing is not neutral. Creating nothing requires what we know as failure on purpose. It requires that you make a mess of your mind. It requires that you deconstruct your relationship to creative writing as an occupation. It requires that you deconstruct your relationship to productivity, reconstruct your relationship to nothing.

When my partner and I moved into our new place, we brought the contents of, basically, a one-bedroom apartment to fill up a two-story house. We ordered more furniture because we were convinced that the space would need to be filled. Instead, we arranged the living room before the new furniture even arrived, finding it superfluous when we did, even though it was beautiful. We had not taken stock. As it turns out, what we had was enough.

When you ask children who they want to be when they grow up, they often list occupations they have heard or seen in the world we have presented to them. Your perspective now, NTBAM, is likely much more complex than the one you had when you were a child. There was less in the way of your play. The stakes of your actions have grown higher over the years. You have been watched. You’ve learned of the world more than you maybe ever wanted to. Make space for all that, and make, also, space for a little more.

If you haven’t taken a holiday from writing in a while, I suggest you try doing so. Do nothing during your writing time instead. Take stock of what you have and what you know. Clear a space—a physical space—where you can do anything, be anyone you want. Turn off the cameras and enjoy a place without surveillance. A place of purposeful failure. This is play—it is the anonymity of not mattering as much as you want.

‘Is There a Way to Read With Love?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Your letter to M and deconstruction of brutal honesty was so, so nourishing. Thank you. Here is the question I am left with at the end of it: how do we read with love? In a class on nature and translation, my professor always urges us to read “in friendship”: toward the writer and the text too. What can criticism based in love look like? Where do I begin?

Sincerely,
Critical Love

Srinagar, Kashmir

Dear CL,

While starting the response to your letter this week, I thought of, and immediately went to read, Eve Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading. It has been so long since I’d heard of this essay that I can’t remember if I’ve read it before it or if I’ve simply spoken about it with friends in queer and academic circles (not mutually exclusive).

I didn’t set out to include Sedgwick’s thinking in this letter about creative writing. Sedgwick is writing for an academic audience, particularly those in queer and feminist thought, but her essay is still about reading practices and, more importantly, she is thinking about what kind of knowledge reading produces. At the beginning of the essay, she admits that her “unremarkable epiphany” is this: “knowledge does rather than simply is ” [1].

CL, your letter got me interested in this question. I, too, want to read with love. But to answer your question, I felt like I needed to start with how we read now as writers. What are the practices we use to produce knowledge? What feelings, behaviors, and actions, does that knowledge produce? And is that the knowledge we’re looking for?

The bulk of Sedgwick’s essay focuses on describing paranoid reading before comparing, and offering, an idea of reparative reading. I was surprised, honestly, that the more I read Sedgwick’s essay, the more I could imagine it next to, or around, the approach we bring to the creative writing classroom, and the more it aligned with some of what I was trying to get at in ‘How Do I Overcome My Inner Critic?’ So I hope you won’t mind the detour—I promise to answer your question at the other end.

Sedgwick writes that paranoid reading is anticipatory—it “requires that bad news be already known” [2]. With writing, I think of the never-ending search for expertise, trying to get ahead of the game. Think: the impulse to search for teachers, how-to articles, retreats, and even advice columns like this. All are in service of knowing, before anyone else does, how to be a better writer, which you may or may not interpret as how to be a better worker, which you may or may not interpret as how to be a better person. It’s the impulse to be in the know and not be caught off-guard by someone else’s reading—someone else’s ability to see your flaws.

The second detail is that paranoid reading is “reflexive and mimetic.” Sedgwick lays it out like this: “Paranoia proposes both Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first —to myself” [3]. All those nights spent wondering what your writing needs in order to be “right?” All those workshops and classes you take to be “corrected?” The inner critic who assails your sentences before you can even get them out? The professor who tears your work down in front of the class? The trick to never being on the defensive is to always be on the offensive. We practice humiliation on ourselves and each other. Then we mistake power and authority for those who humiliate others the most.

The third and fourth attributes of paranoid reading: it is both a strong theory and a theory with humiliation as its underlying affect, or emotion. Paranoia shapes systems widely beyond itself [4]. There’s a rippling effect on all these systems surrounding it: they organize to minimize what feels bad. The more effort you spend on minimizing humiliation, the fewer resources you have to search for pleasure [5].

The fifth and final aspect of paranoia is that it places “extraordinary stress on…knowledge in the form of exposure” [6]. That is, paranoia banks on the fact that exposure is the most efficient way for knowledge to do something. It “deconstructs,” it “reveals,” it “exposes.” In the case for writers reading other writers, to be exposed is to do what? Does another’s humiliation make them a better writer? Does shaming divergent aesthetics, contrary or elsewhere from that which is traditional or expected, advance the big river of art?

Sedgwick ends on the possibility of reparative reading, and for a reparative reading, it is important to “surrender the knowing,” even “realistic and necessary to experience surprise” [7]. For the roving panoptic eye of paranoia can’t tolerate surprise. It must know beforehand—it must anticipate already everything that has happened and that is about to happen. In order to tolerate surprise, one would have to dismantle all these mechanisms in place to divert humiliation. A paranoid reader can’t afford surprise and therefore, also, can’t reach surprise and what sometimes comes with it—pleasure.

In contrast, reparative reading not only allows surprises, it openly wants them. I liked best when Sedgwick quotes Joseph Litvak, who says, “Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises” [8]?

She goes on, then, to say that “[t]he desire of a reparative impulse…is additive and accretive” [9]. It banks on survival by keeping what it can. Sedgwick’s idea of reparative reading is what anchors how I’ll define reading with love or, as your professor called it, reading “in friendship” toward the writer and the text.

Writing about Sedgwick to you, CL, is vulnerable for me. You are watching me think “out loud.” What if I misread a part of her essay? What if I’ve glossed too much? But I’m putting this out there because I believe you already know how to read with love. We read with love in community, with friends who welcome our most bumbling experiments and intellectual leaps. This is the same space that we also need to be creative. Space enough where a correction can be achieved without humiliation. Space enough to make good mistakes.

To read with love is to read without obsession to expose others. Of what? Of being part of this world, too? What does policing do for literature but make more police? In the feedback we give each other? In our friendships? In our minds?

Perhaps to read with love is not only to collect the fragments of life for oneself, but to “repair,” to draw together that which may otherwise stay apart. Perhaps to read with love means to ask how we keep each other, not discard each other.

One of the most vital shifts I have made as a writer looking out onto the literary world was a realization, one day in class, that though my students come to class for my expertise, for themselves, or for reasons of self-interest, the space of the classroom lends us to response. Response not to what they know, but what they don’t know—about their peers, about themselves, and how they might relate to others.

This value is not possible alone with self-help books, on book tours, or prizes of the highest degree: the writing group is literature alive. If you do it right, you will notice the moment that poem or story you didn’t care for lighting a fire in someone’s life, start a friendship, throw over the connective thread that exists in the step beyond literature.

To read with love is to believe in these accumulations, to allow them in, and to help them grow. In community, the literature becomes incidental: we encounter each other.

To read with love, you must shift your attention from your own importance to believe in the importance of someone else. For, let’s face it: a reader who focuses only on one way being right is not able to see a work as it is—they read a work as its mistakes, its deviations. A reader in search of what they already know can rarely see what they don’t. And the drive to only see a world of what we know? It forecloses the possibilities of changing with a world around us.

To read with love is to believe in the value of accumulation over exclusion. It is to read with vulnerability. Vulnerability to one’s self being changed.

At the end of Sedgwick’s essay, she writes that paranoid and reparative reading are both about survival. But while the paranoid reader repeats the past by acting and wishing only on what they know, the reparative reader acts out the future by believing in the possibility of what they don’t know. That is, what is, exactly, good literature at all? Who reads it? Who needs it?

By including more of the past, we invite more futures. In reading with love, we hold more, together, without humiliation or fear. To read with love is to begin that process of giving freedom back to ourselves.

When you read with love, our traditions grow larger and more various. The faces and circumstances of life can change. And what of literature in that chaos? Isn’t that the point? We all deserve some chance, some possibility that we didn’t know we needed, preserved in the dust-leaps of imperfect archives.

You read with love so you can write with love. Your work is not to explain—it is to write into the future. To be surprised by what could be. To live more than yourself.

Notes

[1] Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling , Duke University Press, 2002. Pg. 124.
[2] Ibid., pg. 130.
[3] Ibid., pg. 131.
[4] Ibid., pg. 133.
[5] Ibid., pg. 136.
[6] Ibid., pg. 138.
[7] Ibid., pg. 146.
[8] Ibid., pg. 147.
[9] Ibid., pg. 149.

‘Is My Friend Taking Advantage of My Edits?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for this column. I feel like I’ve learned so much from you about how to write, and love writing, while staying vigilant and critical of the MFA/publishing systems’ injustices.

I have a question on that theme: where is the boundary between writing and editing, collaboration and being taken advantage of?

I am a writer and also a very good editor. I give very specific suggestions. I enjoy editing and making my friends’ pieces as good as they can be, but I also feel conflicted. I have one friend in particular who often asks me for edits, and I’ve given them, mostly for work in a different genre than what I write. He has more publications than me, also in this genre. Until recently this hadn’t bothered me in a way that made me question our working relationship, though I have felt jealous, and odd seeing a sentence I wrote in the published version, credited to only him, because that’s how credit generally works: to one person, the writer.

I’m also generally someone who’s very anxious and competitive and I would like to be less so. Writing is and should be considered a collaborative effort! Writing that doesn’t get published in prestigious publications, i.e., conditions of artificial scarcity, matters (more) too! But recently, my friend and I applied for the same thing and we edited each other’s pieces and he gave me helpful edits but I couldn’t help noticing that I gave him more specific — and also just more — edits, more of which made it into the final draft.

I’m also the type who struggles to ask for help, while he is much more comfortable with it. So maybe we should meet in the middle. But I just know that finding out the result of this application will be a very uncomfortable experience for me.

I think I’ve already realized that I need to set a boundary as to how involved my editing can be in these situations, but I also don’t feel good about it.

Sincerely,
It’s Not Him It’s The System

Dear INHITS,

Reading your letter made me think about the round of first readers I send my own work to. These friends are often busy in some way, shape, or form, but bring different sensibilities to their readings of my work: all encouraging while highlighting various facets of the work I’m doing.

These friends of mine don’t always come through. Sometimes, it’s a medical emergency (one recently has been recovering from not one but two concussions!), others have chronic illnesses, and still others are swamped by their own work. It always surprises me when I receive, even weeks from the day I sent my drafts, a generous “short” response from any of them in the midst of all this life. It makes the moments when I receive pages, typed or handwritten, and long editorial walks in the park, all the more valuable.

For this is the economy of friendship, isn’t it? Romantically goofy, imprecise, and often touch-and-go depending on the shapes of our lives. What underlies these interactions is not a sense of what we owe each other, but an appreciation for when our worlds align and to witness the treasure of a fellow traveler writing and changing with you over time.

All this which seems, at first, accidental, always starts with an intention: you and a friend, following the unwritten good faith of writing community, agree to read each other’s work. Some relationships like this are frequent—the poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell used to fax each other new poems. Others may be built with more space understood in them, like the exchange I described above with my friends: having space not to respond, even though we really might like to, reflects how we want to give each other’s works attention when we are at our best.

Writing relationships don’t always work out this way. Inevitably, an unwritten agreement may be broken; an assumed mutual value may be overlooked or miscommunicated. Ultimately, the dilemma you’ve outlined here becomes perhaps, a common one. In your case, INHITS, you’ve noticed that your friend comes to you more frequently than the other way around. When your exchanges are mutual, his edits are helpful but not at the level of detail that you actually want. And, to bring it all home, you’ve noticed how deeply your edits shape and affect the writing that’s gaining him prestige and accolades.

There’s trouble afoot when it seems less like you’re traveling side-by-side and more like you’re carrying someone else’s load on your own baggage. Your exchange must not only be equal but sufficiently separate you and your friend. You made a small mention of how your friend’s published work has included sentences you’ve written but were credited to him. The written work is often just a symptom of a larger relationship dynamic. If you can’t tell how much of a final piece is your friend’s work and how much is your own, it’s clear that you are cowriting and not just editing.

I agree with you that you should check yourself on being anxious and competitive, but the feelings you have here are not petty. In writing exchanges like this, value is determined by barter. So there’s a twofold emotional effect going on when your friend’s edits are fewer and shorter than your own: you see his edits as his judgment of what effort your work is worth to him, and you’re angry at yourself for putting more effort into your critique in the first place.

Why have you ignored your sense of discomfort with this friend? If you value your own work so much, why are you still agreeing to edit your friend’s work when you know you won’t receive if not the same, then something of equal value to you, in return?

Perhaps it’s difficult for you to ask for help because you were raised to believe that this was a weakness, and you resent your friend for being able to do so, for whatever personal or social reasons working in his favor, because you were never given that space and leeway. Or perhaps you dismiss your own concerns when you pathologize yourself. Perhaps being weak meant never receiving care. To be weak was an emotional luxury. You couldn’t be weak. You could never afford to fail.

You’ve already decided, by the end of your letter, that you need to set a boundary in how involved you get in these editing situations. That may be the case. But do you struggle to set boundaries not only in writing, but in other parts of your life? Do you often drop the time you’ve set for yourself to get back to people or their requests? Are you often giving advice or help to a friend who disappears when you need that care in return?

The thing is, lowering your standards to match your friend’s editing seems like the literary equivalent of acting “cool” in a relationship. You betray yourself by pretending not to care about what you actually care about. Sure, it’s possible that your friend can give you better edits if you ask for them. It’s possible that your emotional energy will be worth the effort in order to navigate that conversation. Not knowing your relationship, you are the only one who can make this call. But the worst part of imposter syndrome isn’t overworking on the things we can read on the page: it’s overworking for relationships that should have been nourishing us in the first place.

If you’ve grown into an adult who finds it difficult to ask for help, perhaps you were told, as a child, that your basic needs were too demanding. That sense of unease in your gut—is it familiar? Perhaps you fought your neglect by becoming the self-sufficient rock you are today, competing for little morsels of recognition by outperforming everyone else.

Whatever you do, I recommend that you don’t practice setting boundaries with this friend, especially if you’re not used to saying no, because he’s already not noticed—and stepped over—several of your own. Not only did you grit through this discomfort of this too-close editorial exchange: he’s also done nothing to stop it and has no qualms about taking, and asking for, your work.

If you were my friend, INHITS, in this year of absolute change, I would tell you this: you can get what you want right now, without any work, because you are allowed to choose. You’re not a rock, you’re a squishy person with needs and desires that are just as real as everyone else’s. Before you can fight for your labor’s value, you need to learn and practice what it is for yourself.

I love the confidence with which you talk about your editorial skills. Just proclaiming yourself “a very good editor” shows that you esteem your own work, which is half the struggle in getting your due as a worker in the first place. Have you considered editing as a day job or even in a freelance capacity? Putting a concrete value to your editorial services (check out the rates at the Editorial Freelancers Association and what other writer/editors have on offer), can have a palpable impact on what you subsequently choose to do for free.

You also need practice in letting in love without having to do anything at all. You deserve friends who will naturally remind you of that, not question you when you bring your needs up. You deserve friends who show up for you in the ways you want, not the ways you can tolerate. You not only deserve the kinds of edits you want, you also deserve friends who understand you because they’re trying to grow too, and they patiently make space for you to nudge your budding needs along, however long they may need to come around.

You deserve friends who welcome your changes and choices: friends who remind you of the version of yourself you’re trying to become. These friends remind you of your inherent value. They make it easier for you to fight less, not more. So you can let go of your need to be strong. So you can make mistakes and be sloppy and even ask for more than what you believe you deserve. Until eventually you’ll know when you should ask for more. So you can choose what you want without having to ask at all.

‘How Do I Overcome My Inner Critic?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi:

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on everything writing, especially writing today, now.

As an emerging writer, I sometimes feel like I keep looking in the wrong places (or to the wrong people) to grow myself as a writer. Three years ago, I thought school would be the best choice for me to be set on the ‘right’ path to learning the ins/outs of writing. I have taken numerous workshops (in-person when that was a thing but most recently online), I have completed a few writing residencies and am now in the final year of completing my MFA in Creative Writing. There is no doubt that I write differently now than how I did when I first started writing yet I can’t seem to shake the belief that even though I understand the mechanics of organizing my thoughts better, my writing still sounds like it did when I first started: that it still feels very infant. And when I re-read my stories or go to edit them, those feelings become paralyzing.

I guess my question is two-fold and you are welcome to answer whichever one speaks to you: how do you deal with this kind of paralysis? How does one stop themselves from comparing what we make with the writers who are winning the awards or getting published in reputable literary magazines? Is this a natural aspect? Is there is something that helps you? Does it get better after your first manuscript/book is published?

And, to the second aspect, what is the best path for a writer to improve their writing? Is it as simple as producing content over a long period of time and accepting that becoming a better writer is a life-long quest...? Am I just too impatient with my three years in? Is there a moment that you remember that was a pivot point for you? I am so curious.

I guess it is easy to say, you’re writing for yourself. Just keep going and change will come. That the mastery will come over time. But so often, the rejections and/or the lack of what I feel is ‘publishable’ work seem to be saying the opposite. That I’m not doing this writing thing the way it is meant to be done. That maybe I am not giving it enough of my time (I work and mother and school and it’s a struggle on any day). Who am I to attempt this herculean feat...?

Okay, maybe there are many questions in there. Lots of food for thought hopefully.

My best,
Manj

Penticton, BC (Canada)

Dear M,

You’ve written a letter of many questions and, though you might be self-conscious of their number, having them together tells me so much more about you than if you had asked only one. I also don’t think you’re alone in having these questions all at once: many writers have to deal with the inner critic and how to improve at one point.

Of the questions you asked, here are the ones that jumped out to me: how do you stop comparing yourself to others and just write? How do you improve as a writer? And, perhaps, a secret question. You are already doing so much: in the face of all these rejections, why should you keep going?

While you have done residencies, workshops, are finishing out an MFA, and you certainly acknowledge your writing is different, you still think it’s “infant,” and you’re wondering if there’s any epiphany I had to get over that inner critic. In order to get there, I have to talk about a common artistic pedagogy that you’ve probably encountered or asked for.

In the workshops I teach, I require that students ask two questions of their own about each piece they bring in. One of the things I see again and again is students asking for “brutal honesty”—the implication being that their ego can take the fire of harsh words if there is gold in the ashes. While I do concede that this method provides familiarly instant results, I believe they do more harm than good.

Brutal honesty is about hacking a piece down into its most acceptable parts. It’s reportedly the fastest way to get to what’s good—and the fastest way to do away with the bad. In writing, in the face of a society that wants artists to prove that we’re workers, that our time is valuable, and that our desire to make art is real, brutal honesty is optimization: to make as much as possible, but only the best, as quickly as possible.

Brutal honesty is about conquest. And it’s the primary way artists are taught to receive criticism today. But what is the best, M? Brutal honesty won’t tell you this. Brutal honesty is impatient. Brutal honesty is interested, first, in destruction. Destruction of what you’ve built, perhaps save for a few stones and pillars, in order to build atop your ancestral land. Brutal honesty doesn’t teach you how to make your own decisions—why certain kinds of writing matter to you or how to write not for a deadline but for ever—it teaches you to move over and then to follow its structures and commands.

Even if you don’t think of yourself as participating in brutal honesty, it’s a pervasive part of artistic pedagogy. The faster it eliminates, the stronger its expertise. The harder the blow, the more loving its honesty. The deeper your silence, the more you grow. This violence manipulates modesty into dependence: dependence on authority figures who can tell you what’s best; dependence on prizes and publications that show you what’s best; dependence on a budding inner critic, your double in every way who, just like those instructors, builds their empire at your expense. This inner critic knows exactly what to say in order to scare you, punish you, and bully you into insecurity. This inner critic mistakes violence for honesty, domination for perfection, content for art, productivity for life.

The lie behind brutal honesty is that there is a ‘right path’—one that makes your disappearance acceptable. The lie silences by force. And the prestige it bestows on those who believe it ruthlessly teaches you to seek and emulate its violence again in the process.

The process of unraveling brutal honesty is one of unraveling a previous system of authority you’ve inherited. The inner critic, like the outer critics, never truly goes away. On some days, I get to my desk and it’s as loud as it was when I first started writing. The sentences that come don’t align with what I’ve come to say. But I’ve learned not to be swayed by the ugliness of the new. For there is a writer and a reader in you. It’s important not to confuse the two.

As a writer, you are always your first reader. The world may not yet reflect what you choose as your best. This advice may not get you published or help you win a prize. It may not help you get better in the ways you initially asked. But I’d rather you learn how to change for yourself, to write in accordance with yourself, because there’s no technique, trick, or lecture that will conceive for you the voices you’ll need in the span of your life.

For you’re right, M. You cannot improve if you only write. You must change. You must experiment, play, break down, and further your field of vision. But you must not only change the way you write: you must change the way you read. It is not enough to be free. In order to be free, you have to practice freedom. And the most distressing, terrible, and vital freedom is the exercise of believing yourself in not knowing best , but knowing something , and that something, being important to you, is worthy of being written, too. Someone will need what you’re going to say. And you will know this because you’ve needed it.

The goal of the reader is to discern and decide: what do I love? What do I hate? What exists—and what do I want so much that I would search forever for it? My inner critic lives with my reader. I changed my reader by changing who I was reading for. I practice this through reading for close friends and students. In the beginning, the generosity I couldn’t afford myself was easy to give to others. Rather than with domination, I’ve learned how to read with love. New systems of power don’t grow when we’re alone. I had to realize new ways of reading for a community in order to realize it for myself.

Joan Didion once suggested that “[w]e tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Of course, she continues: “At least for a little while.” For your voice must not improve: it must transform. In how we choose to change, in that coltish voice, lives a self where another reader can truly recognize you. And within that small exchange, there’s a spark of a world where there are reasons to write beyond domination and control. Perhaps, beyond that “little while,” it’s not that we stop telling stories, but that we change who they are for—that we’ve changed each other and we’ve changed ourselves.

‘Where Do I Find Inspiration?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi, I love your newsletter! I write professionally, but not really creative stuff... just reported magazine articles or, I guess, criticism (this feels like such an incorrect and highbrow way of describing what I actually write, but I’m sure you get it). I read mostly fiction books (probably to counteract spending my days reading magazine/newspaper articles!) and love to think about what it would be like to write a short story or a novel or anything remotely in the category of creative writing. I love reading your advice about showing up to do the writing! But I have no idea what I would write.

How do people come up with stuff out of thin air? I feel like people always talk about drawing from their own experiences, but for me I imagine that would feel boring, indulgent, or forced. But then I’d have to make something up entirely, which sounds impossible. Reporting makes sense to me because it forms the story for me, and I don’t know how to get to a place where I could even write a short story from my own head. I often sit down to write freeform, but I always just end up basically journaling, which is even EASIER than reported stuff—it’s just the boring stuff in my own head!

I think the problem I’m having is one of inspiration—it’s hard enough to form a story idea from something that exists in the world, and to commit to telling that story well, from beginning to end, and fact check it! But that’s a craft, and I basically know how to do it. I think I’ve done it long enough that I can’t imagine myself being creative in any more whimsical way. Have you struggled at all with this? Are there things I can do to shake me out of my extremely non-fiction ways?

Santa Fe, NM

Dear ____,

The question you ask of inspiration is one older than both of us. Over time, it’s been attributed to various sources of vibrancy—from disposition to illness to a quality of spirit. But I believe that anyone can discover what it is they want to write. It is a matter of recognizing what it is you want to find.

The late poet Linda Gregg once wrote that the “art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human” [1]. This art Gregg gets at is a practice of attention. Not that of a documentarian, recording for the next camera-op, or “painstaking” deliberation of detail, but one of passive awareness, one in which you witness the world “in the corner of the eye,” as poet Erica Hunt has put it [2]. While one’s gaze might skip now across the view on one’s street—the trees stripped for winter, cars glossed in the parking lot, a young man gliding by thick in a grey letterman—the details that you notice reveal your gaze; they reveal the awareness unique to where you’re coming from.

When I was very young, I was obsessed with one of those world-building multi-player games with castles, crypts, and lands that each harbored their own kinds of magical creatures. I was obsessed with the game not for any interest I had in winning—I loved it because I could minutely discover new worlds; I loved it because I could make my own maps. Rather than slowly galloping through the unknown pixels to reveal the maps that were set for me, I could create from the get, bestow gold mines for my characters, choose the exact features and situation for the princes I often played as.

I wrote stories from there. Whether I was the protagonist or voyeur, I was also a seven-year-old in a basement typing intently on a text document, saving it on a treasured purple floppy disk. It never occurred to me to write about reality as it was. My writing was reserved for what it could be.

This game gave me worlds in chunks: groups of characters who inhabited one kind of castle, kinds of creatures found in their realms. It also gave me pre-made dramas like revenge, long-lost royalty, and secret coups. At seven, I had no concept of clichés or tropes: everything was new. My writing grew from my willingness not to be original, but to explore, express, and, eventually, to understand.

___, from what you write in your letter above, facts don’t have to come from you: facts simply exist in the world. Facts don’t weigh on you like freedom. Facts come with a story for you to discover and piece together. They make a skeleton not only of what to write, but something worthy of being written. It may be terrifying, deep-down, to claim what you deem important. Without news cycles or cultural relevance, how do you choose for yourself? What nourishes you so much that it is always good?

It seems you’re being stifled by an idea of originality that just isn’t true. It certainly appears that there are writers out there who are conjuring things out of thin air, building stories and worlds that seem to have nothing to do with ours. But every story comes from someone and every someone comes from somewhere. A story is not written by words alone: it appears because a writer was responding to something else that already exists.

Linda Gregg calls these the “resonant sources,” structures and experiences of your life that will propel your work for the rest of your life [3]. Hence Gregg’s art of finding. Hence my own realization that my own life as a writer is a constant loop with what do I want in the world? They say that we’re often writing the same poems, the same stories, again and again. I have called it, in the past, the glimpse of a plane where the words illuminate, music pouring out. Sometimes it’s not a matter of finding. Sometimes it’s a matter of just writing down what you can.

Practically speaking, this means that you’re never starting out of thin air. You come from somewhere and you want to go somewhere. Your writing must answer these questions. It doesn’t matter how exactly you start to do this. The important thing is to calibrate your recognition of when you’ve found it.

You can start, ___, by writing with the structures you like most. Is there an esoteric system that fascinates you? Perhaps you could build a world from its features. Have you read a news story recently that left you wanting more of what happened? Create the details that you will never know from the available facts but might be plausible from them. Is there a dream you’ve had recently that made no sense, but whose absurdity grabbed your attention? Write it down and don’t look back for a few months. Have you ever been in love before you met someone? What was the fantasy you created of who they are? What do all these attractions say about you and what you want, in the end?

Over the years, I’ve never stopped writing in the way I did as a kid. Of course, the grain of my attention has matured. The chunks have whittled down to details; my understanding of where each detail fits being magnified and multiplied by libraries and lives lived, loves shared, homes filled. But the general concept is the same: notice yourself noticing. Write down what it is. Then write down why you’ve noticed it. Then write down what else it could be.

Our writing, in the end, contains composites of what propelled us at one point or another. They are collages of desire, a motley crew of yes and more and please. And writing gives us the gift of those other lives. From the bones of what you wish for come the dreams that make them not this reality, but a reality. Dream becomes memory. Rather than conjuring, let your writing remember. Let yourself, its first reader, understand what you’ve kept. Then never let us forget.

Notes

[1] Linda Gregg, from “The Art of Finding” (2006).
[2] Erica Hunt , collected in Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems (2020).
[3] From “The Art of Finding” (2006).

‘I Think I’m a Writer, But What Kind Am I?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

First, I want to thank you for all the time and love you put into these letters. I look forward to The Reading every week, and I admire the safe and welcoming community you created. Thank you!

After having been a reader for a little while, it is now time for me to write my own letter seeking guidance and wisdom. I think I'm a writer. I know the reasons why I hesitate to embrace the label (I fear failing to live up to it, I am insecure about my lack of externally recognized work, etc) and have been working to change the way I think about myself and my relationship to writing. I’m very much a beginner in this whole process and I definitely subscribe(d) to the habit of craving validation for my identity and this label of “writer”—I wanted to get prestigious internships and get published and dreamed of being recognized because I thought that was the only valid way of being a writer in the capitalist society we live in, but it only soured my relationship with the craft and paralyzed me.

I am trying to return to writing—for myself, not for the validation, and hopefully with less of the self-imposed pressure and expectation. But I keep running into a block...I think I am a writer, but I don't know how to discover the mode and medium that allows me to live and embrace my truth. Am I a fiction writer? A poet? Or a journalist, an essayist? Some kind of cultural commentator? Or am I a genre-bending question mark? I know that no writer must be defined by a single genre, but I feel lost because I don’t know what ~kind~ of writer I am (which compounds the anxiety of whether I really am a writer). I don’t know what kind of nourishment I need and am seeking. I don’t know what kind of writing will bring me fullness, or what kind of fullness I can bring to it in return. Part of it is that I want to share something of myself with the world, to help and connect with others, and I think I’m meant to do that through writing but I’m not clear on what it can offer to the world or to myself—just that if I were to put some goodness into this wild universe, it would probably be through this odd and complex medium.

I haven’t properly written in so long, partially because of the process of overcoming previous trauma and partially also because of the paralysis I mentioned earlier. I used to think that my purpose in writing (mostly in the form of private journaling, or the odd poem here and there) was to overcome this trauma and express some of the pain I experienced, but I guess part of me was left disappointed because writing didn’t help as much as I thought it would; it didn’t relieve the pain, and maybe it was because I wasn’t good at expressing myself that way. Part of me feels that I failed, that my original purpose for writing must have been misguided because I didn’t succeed. Maybe I should turn to new forms, like journalism, fiction-writing, or essay writing—any kind of writing with more boundaries where I can detach myself a little and attempt to find a new purpose. Am I just running away from myself and if so, how might I find a way back?

Thanks so much for everything,

S
Tokyo, Japan

Dear S,

You’ve already thought through so much of what I could have said to you in your letter. You know that you’re a writer, that you care about writing, but you don’t know exactly how you’re going to bring that writing into the world. You’ve also had a writing life already, one in which you journaled and wrote poems, thinking that it was to achieve catharsis and to help your pain, but you weren’t successful at the time. You feel as though you’ve already failed once as a writer because of this. Now, it sounds like you’re asking how to start over again.

You’re looking at other genres like fiction, essay-writing, and journalism because you see those as having more boundaries from the self than the highly personal writing you’ve been doing. You want to distance yourself from your previous failure and what you see as a misguided intention for expressing yourself, so naturally you’re looking to forms that seem more direct in their structures and less personal in their content.

It’s true: using your life as the source of your subject matter can be exhausting, a constant wait for inspiration to arrive and for the writing to finally commence. It’s also true that writing, in itself, is not therapy—working through the traumas of our pasts requires outside help with trained specialists and support groups—in fact, you might find yourself writing your way into an echo chamber, an intricate trap that you’ve set yourself rather than the gradual awareness to set you free. The problem isn’t expressing yourself correctly: it’s that the work you needed to do was never something you could do alone.

You’re treating genre as a kind of form or structure, perhaps in the way that you’d choose a major in school. You’re looking outward for a sense of structure so you won’t be bogged down by your own voice. Sometimes structure can serve as permission. At other times, it can be evasion.

You’re afraid of running away from yourself, as you mentioned at the end of your letter. Let me assure you: you’ll never be able to run away from yourself. Writing can only come alongside you to where you are on your journey. It reflects, in fractals and distortions, where we are. We must still choose where to go next, in the end. Sometimes, we choose the questions, but more often than not, we are choosing the answers. Answers, like paint chips, that we hold up against the question of who we are.

Focus on answering the question.

If a genre is an answer, it doesn’t matter what genre you write in: your questions will find you in different expressions. You can’t pick a genre like you pick a major. There’s no one checking whether you’ve completed the requirements of a degree; no survey course; no midterm evaluation for aptitude or talent. The writer’s life is full of starts and stops. There is no penalty for getting along in your own way.

For six years, I worked double-time as a writer and a software engineer. I learned what it would mean to continue in tech: in fact, I could see my life stretching out in the lives of my coworkers, in the horizon of the industry. I also hit a wall with my professional development. In order to advance in the way I was supposed to, I needed to put in more time to software development outside of work. I would have had to give up the time I used to write. No matter how many times I convinced myself and my manager that I would do more, my heart wasn’t in it. I had no reason, outside of professional obligation, to want to do more.

Part of writing is running fast, far, and in the wrong direction. Don’t be afraid of making choices for fear they aren’t the right ones. You must assume, actually, that they are all the wrong ones. To write is a series of improvisations. Your failures give you as much information as your successes, perhaps even more so. Success comes easily: it fits in the mold, arrives softly on the correct landing, but it teaches you nothing about who you are. Early success can leave you without the wisdom of how to learn, leaving you stuck with imitating for what you’ve most been praised. The best success is an aftermath, the trailing indicator of the work.

When I first thought to left my job in tech, I was convinced that I would freefall into failure. My saving grace, contrary to what you might think, was limiting the scope of my experiment. Doing the math of my expenses and needs, I gave myself a runway of a year. If I had not achieved what I wanted as a writer, or if I hated full-time writing, I would go back to tech at that time.

Ironically, it was working in tech that had given me this idea. My company was experiment-oriented, building “minimum viable products” that ran for a certain amount of time, ultimately greenlighting or discarding a feature based on whether it yielded the desired results. The years I spent in tech were not a waste of my time but gave me the principles that have since allowed me to set necessary boundaries and goals for my work as a writer.

The practical advice in order is that you both must not delay and take as much time as you wish. Do not delay on answering the question: take on a genre of your choosing for a year and commit to it, and don’t do it alone. Take a class or join a writing group. Learn everything you can about that thing: audition that life as far as you can. After that year, take what works and leave the rest. You can try another genre. You can take on another art. But don’t delay on taking action. Give yourself the possibility of your life’s multitudes.

S, you once believed that writing’s purpose was to relieve the pain of trauma. This was your first answer. What would your writing look like if you believed something else? What would be your next?

My first answer to writing was that it didn’t matter. I was ambitious—I wanted to do good in the world, make an impact that solved real problems like homelessness or hunger, not hole away for my own pleasure or, more often than not, suffer for it.

It took the people around me—teachers and friends—to rally me back to writing. Once, in a writing workshop, I confessed to a professor that I struggled with what to write. I felt strongly that there was a moral imperative for me to write about the troubles of the world, to use my art as a way of making good, and that it was absurd, but true, that all I wanted to do was experiment with sound. All I could hear in language, at the time, was music. And I wanted to listen to music all day, play it for myself. My professor looked at me without missing a beat and said, well, why don’t you just do that?

Susan Sontag recounts, in an interview I can’t place at the moment, a conversation with her analyst: Sontag loved writing fiction but felt pressured to keep up with her well-received essays, essays that did good in the world and mattered to people. The analyst asked her why she couldn’t write fiction if it was just for her own pleasure? Didn’t that matter, too?

Most of the time, when we’re looking for structure, we’re looking for permission. A well-wrought path will get you to a destination, somewhere someone else has vetted for you. An untouched field will get you your own desire. It will make you move toward what you want. Life is asking what you want from it. If you don’t delay in answering, you will know what you want when you feel it’s fullness. It will have already arrived.

‘Am I Allowed Writing Resources If I Don’t Belong?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for this series and for your lucid, honest writing. Since discovering your newsletter, I have been sending it to all the artists I know who are struggling with how to live and work these days.

My question to you is about trying to ask for help. I feel really stuck in terms of where to go next with my writing and would really love some guidance. How does one seek mentorship or grants/fellowships with limited resources? By limited, I mean financially limited, as well as categorically limited. I have a British passport, but live in Hong Kong, and have also lived in NYC. I don’t identify as Asian American, so I feel uncomfortable applying for those grants and fellowships; and because I’m not based in the UK, I’m not eligible for any of those grants either. Everywhere I look, there seem to be these identity requirements that I don’t meet, which exacerbates my already unhealthy identity issues. I realize that those identity requirements are in place because the publishing world is so white-centric, but I can’t also help but feel the US and European markets are also ignoring the complexity of diaspora and those living in Asia. When submitting my fiction to some Asian American literary journals, I’m disheartened when I see submission guidelines stating that they don’t want stories from Asia. But at the same time I certainly don’t want to come across like I’m tricking anyone by submitting or applying for events/spaces that I’m technically not invited to. I feel like there’s a divide between POC in America, and POC outside of America, and I don't know how to bridge that. Am I allowed the same resources? Am I allowed to apply/submit?

Dear ____,

I have been thinking about your letter since I received it several weeks ago. Your predicament and the practical questions you’re asking are the results of investments we have, at least in the US, in how and why art is made in relation to the nation-state and capital. You’re right—the publishing industry in the US and Europe are indeed ignoring the complexities of diaspora, and for very particular reasons.

Culture, like land, is yet another ground into which nations stake their flags. There’s reasons, for example, why the Fulbright program is administered by the US Department of State , and why the French, in the late 1980s, created a minister of Rock and Roll to address inadequate dominance there. The state has an imperial agenda as well as a nationalist one. Art, the realm of the imagination, can gild the principles in national consciousness and nationalist identity. It can provide mythology as history, explanation for impetus, and the vision necessary for nationalist action. In literature, to lie takes as much imagination as the truth.

Funding the arts can also be a cover of moral good for other intentions. Developers use art initiatives as a cover for gentrification . In the US, where so much private wealth is derived from the suffering of others, a legacy might be bought (or forgotten) in a wave of arts philanthropy . Arts non-profits, at least from my experience as an artist, seem to be constantly applying to third-party funding, private and public, webbing themselves in Kakfa-esque limitations that come with programming derived from project proposals and third-party requirements.

Perhaps this comes from the fact that places like the US have a very limited safety net, with money being the difference between healthcare and food, with not much in between, and these organizations become mediators in defraying those precarities. Unfortunately, this leaves artists not only to bear the exclusions of these inherited agendas, but also to unconsciously accept, and adopt, the same conditions in making our own art.

Literature in the US organized around where the money was. Now, it seems as though the writing might be impossible without that support. When I was working full-time, I was often jealous of other writers who could take off to residencies or retreats at a moment’s notice. Many of these writers had the independent wealth to stay unemployed or only flexibly employed. For those who weren’t, these residencies were not only artistic necessities but important parts of their financial pictures: a few months away from home was a sublet and travel opportunity all in one, if they could afford the other expenses. Yet, something in me could never square how many residencies were structured, over time and habit, to exclude full-time caregivers, artists with families, and artists who could not afford to take time off.

I say all this to emphasize that these organizations you are looking to for support are designed to be limited. They are limited by tax codes and nations. They are limited by the time and energy of (usually) a few overextended staff members. But most of all, they are limited by external agendas and conditional money that preclude and prevent a free and open arts culture to grow.

There are some examples of these conditions and requirements being overcome by effort and circumstance. In 2015, the Yale Younger Series Prize dropped their requirement for writers to be under 40. That same year, the Undocupoets, a group of undocumented poets based in the US, successfully campaigned several major first book poetry contests to remove citizenship-based conditions in their terms. This year, COVID-19 has radically opened many location-limited events to anyone in the world, opening a cache of cultural resources that were previously inaccessible online.

But you wrote about about how to ask for help. Community organizing may well be one of the steps you’d be interested in taking to change the terms you’re writing of in your letter, but perhaps you wrote because you need the support you find impossible to receive.

____, you probably already knew that my answer to your letter was going to be a complicated one. You want to know if you have a right to resources: a right to time, space, and economic relief that others like you, but not exactly like you, seem to be worthy of. You see this sea of opportunities passing over you without a second thought and you register how unfair it is to not be thought of; to not exist; to not only be ignored but actively excluded from these organizations and agendas that see no use in your subject position. So perhaps you wonder, under all this, if you have the audience to be a writer.

For being a writer, even with institutional support, is selfish enough, isn’t it? At least, with an audience or a fellowship, you might imagine that someone else desires your work and wants it to exist. You might imagine that with the right institution that caters to the right audience, your writing will find the understanding it deserves. You might want for your writing what you want for yourself: to be understood and to belong somewhere—a home that is bigger than yourself.

Your circumstances, ____, have put you in a categorical exile. Displaced from definition, you suffer because the places you thought you’d belong do not recognize you. Consciousness of what causes your suffering will ease the influence it has on your life. You will not always have the means to get those needs met. You may feel, now or over time, an incredible loneliness. But the way you survive will be completely different from the way you expect to.

In order to manifest something more than yourself, you must be clear with yourself on the help you need. If you are in search of a community, you may end up in more than one. If you are looking for guidance, you may end up discovering your own expertise. If you are searching for a mirror, you may have to align not along identities or nations but along where you are right now, what resources you have, or what vision of life you dream of in common: no matter. To recognize your needs and to meet them, however imperfectly, is to recognize yourself.

What you know as recognition is a kind of disappearance. Institutions, nations, and even families have easy roles to blend into. In many cases, they require you to do so. You wrote yourself that the publishing industry is ignoring the complexities of diaspora in Asia—I believe you. In fact, your experiences and your situation do not make you invisible. They make you uniquely situated to see in-between what is readily available. They make it impossible for you to disappear.

Your life, ____, requires an extraordinary act of imagination. While I cannot offer you relief from these structures, I can offer you this: who you speak to is not confined to the definitions of our time, but the readers who come upon your work when they most need you. If you write now, then you will appear in that future time. You will show up for yourself in this one. We do not write to mirror the limitations that mark our time but to mark the moments when something new becomes familiar—worthy of consciousness, worthy of difficulty, worthy of repetition, worthy of life.

‘How Can I Work, Write, and Be Part of a Family?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi Yanyi,

A few years ago I completed an MFA. I’d been writing for over a decade but didn’t feel like I was getting any better - I needed help, and a community, and that’s exactly what I found there. But one of the things that year exposed was the disconnect between my partner’s view of writing and my own.

When I signed up to that MFA, it felt like permission to find a routine that worked for me, a year to really make something of my writing practice without the demands of 9-5 work. Except even that year was something of a disappointment. Instead of liberating me to treat my writing like a ‘real’ job, something legitimately worth spending my time on, as the year wore on my partner got more and more frustrated with my lack of flexibility, my commitment to the book.

It was as though she thought of it as my hobby - that year my sabbatical from ‘real’ life - and I thought of it as my vocation.

That’s not really improved since. We have a child now, and I’m back in a full-time job, and so opportunities to write are more scarce than ever. In an ideal world I’d be up early in the morning, writing my book before anyone else awakes, carving out time on the weekends to write. In practice, that never happens: if I wake up early, my partner can’t get back to sleep; if I don’t go out with my family on the weekends, then not only is my partner left to do solo child care, but I miss out on the formative years of my child’s life.

I love my family, Yanyi, and I love my partner. My times with them have been the most rewarding experiences of my life, and watching my child grow has changed me profoundly. But I feel like I need to write, and my window for doing so shrinks every day. The last book I completed, written in the gaps, nearly broke me - and the prospect of writing another is daunting to say the least.

These days I’m not sure whether I was ever right to see writing as a vocation - and justify all those nights spent typing alone in the office, every one taking me away from my partner - or whether that was the wrong perspective all along. And I’m also not sure whether my expectations of what it might mean for my partner to be supportive are realistic or monstrous. I know I’m asking a lot of her, and yet the infrastructure of our life is set up in such a way that everything seems designed to stop me writing.

Truthfully I’m starting to wonder how I can work, write and be part of a family, and of those things, the only one I can compromise on is writing. I don’t want to do that, but I can’t see any other way. Perhaps you can.

Thanks,

Happily Married But

Dear HMB,

In some ways, I’m the least qualified person to answer to the dilemma you’re describing here. I’ve lived alone for the better part of the last decade and I’ve technically never been a parent. I’ve only struggled with writing with a full-time job, never mind taking care of a helpless tiny human while also trying to be there for a partner. Yet, so much came up for me when I read your letter, and I wonder if there’s something in there that might help your thinking and situation.

Right now, you feel like the “infrastructure of [your] life is set up” to “stop [you] writing.” You have a full-time job, I assume, because you need to keep the lights on at home. I will assume, too, that your partner is also working full-time, whether that’s as a stay-at-home parent or with some other job. To top it all off, if your kid is school-age, then both of you are double-timing as their virtual school supervisors and playmates, too. Quarantining during the pandemic has forced us to confront the realities of our home life with more frequency and honesty. It has forced all of us to ask: Is this what I want the shape of my life to look like? Will I ever have power to change it?

HMB, I hear the distress in your voice by the end of your letter. I can hear the mornings you tried to wake up but couldn’t, the weekends you wished you had, and the binds between materially surviving, your family, and your writing. I relate to what you said at the very beginning: that writing is your vocation, not a hobby. I relate to the vulnerability of saying that about something you do: that it is a necessary element of your life. Something you do for yourself and no one else. It can seem silly to say out loud that something so “useless” should mean so much to you.

I was the oldest daughter in an immigrant family, which meant becoming a de-facto third parent for my siblings from when I was still in elementary school. My mother likes to joke that I was not the third but second parent, standing in for my father who often stayed late at work, books and articles piling up in the physical space of his absence. She often told me how she gave up everything when she immigrated, explaining that her life’s fulfillment was her children.

When I became an adult, I couldn’t help but feel a duty to share everything with my family—my home, my finances, my resources, and, most of all, the trajectory of my life. Writing, obviously, never came up as part of that. My parents needed me to be a certain person. My success was their success. That need consumed me, but it had nothing to do with me.

The reason I bring all this up, HMB, is that I see some of what I went through in what you describe. When I came out and stopped speaking to my parents, I was declaring myself as someone separate from them. Someone with needs that had nothing to do with them. Someone whose desires, no matter how trivial or sinful, deserved to be honored. I had lived a life accountable to their needs, their desires. I wanted a life accountable to my own.

Perhaps, like me, you are used to these extremes. Either you continuously punt on your writing or you work on it stubbornly, afraid that if you stop, you won’t get another chance. Each situation is an overcorrection of the last.

When you did your MFA program, you were gulping down the opportunity like water out of the desert. But you mention that your partner was frustrated by your lack of flexibility, your commitment to your book. Now, you’re back on the other end, with writing spiraling out of your own control due to other priorities. Perhaps you both fear missing out on your kid’s life and being the absent parent who selfishly abandons them to work on a make-believe vocation.

While you might be exasperated or even angered by your partner’s frustration around your writing, you’re also afraid that your partner is right and that she’s bearing the brunt of your selfishness. You’re afraid that what you need to work is unfair to what she might want or need, too.

Your fears are not unwarranted. As much as I broke away from a family struggling with boundaries, I also grew up watching my father disappear to escape us and do his work. I watched my mother work full-time while doing childcare, housework, and keeping dinner on the table, all without much input or help from him. I fear becoming Emerson waiting for his mother to drop off meals at his cabin. I fear reproducing millennia of cheating femme and nonbinary people of their own lives because we were all socialized to disappear for men’s. But most of all, I fear becoming my father, eating alone in the kitchen, late at night.

Ursula K. Le Guin said once in an interview that “[o]ne person cannot do two full-time jobs, but two persons can do three full-time jobs — if they honestly share the work.” This thought has followed me often since I read it a few years ago. The tricky thing is not the sharing: it’s understanding, honestly, what the work actually is. The tricky thing is figuring out, through all the distorted ways we were taught to communicate, how to get through to each other with what we’re most afraid to say.

That duty I felt to my parents? It was the only way I had been taught to acknowledge the love they had given me. It was the only version of I love you that they understood. There were a slew of other things we were afraid to say as well. I need you and I miss you . I’m afraid and I don’t know what to do.

Perhaps you’ve been paying close attention to your partner’s judgments of your writing because you were taught to be accountable for someone else’s needs to the point of neglecting your own. Sometimes, when you’ve denied yourself the things you most need, your anger and frustration turn outward toward whatever they’ll latch onto. But most of us have been taught to hide these ugly feelings away. Most of the time, they latch onto the people closest and most intimate to us. Writing is just the tip of the iceberg. What else do you deny yourself? How long will it be before you see your family as an impediment to your existence?

HMB, maybe you and your partner are both compromising first on what you most need for yourselves. You mentioned that “[i]t is as though” your partner “thought of [writing] as [your] hobby,” but have you asked her directly if that’s what she really feels? Is she really in over her head in housework and childcare? Is she not trivializing your dreams, but trying to voice her own needs?

Do you know what your partner dreams of accomplishing, still, in her life, or what she might do with her own sabbatical? Have you asked? Would you be willing to honor it as much as your own? You and your partner need to understand not your child’s needs or the needs of the house but the needs and desires you have for your lives, perhaps with a trusted therapist.

The letter I’m writing to you is only possible because right now, my partner is picking up our week’s groceries and dropping off our packages. It’s still hard for me to say yes when they ask if it would help me if they took on some more errands this week, even harder for me to ask them proactively, just as it’s hard for them to let me take on some bills, some nights when they need someone to listen.

We all deserve to be accountable to ourselves. In partnerships, this means being honest with yourself as much as each other. It means laying out your dreams, no matter how wild yours seem; it means really listening to, and believing in, the value of theirs. The work is more than closing the office door: it’s the dishes and laundry, the days we lose to grief, the moments in your child’s life when they need to be reminded you are there. All this, too, is the work. All this, too, is your life.

There are countless ways the work can be done. There is more when we share what we have and what we need. Allow yourself the gift of giving each other the freedom to choose, just a little. Maybe you’ll write at night, not the morning. Maybe you’ll trade days with your kid at the park. Someone else will make the coffee. Another one might make the bed.

A partnership is a life twice-lived. You’re not sacrificing for each other—you’re building the biggest life you’d both want to live. Do the work and love the life. If you remind each other, in words and in actions, you will actualize the dreams neither of you could have managed alone.

‘Why Can’t I Do My Edits?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t call myself a writer, at least not yet.

I work in a place where I am surrounded by some of the world’s best writers, so I reserve the title for people like them. People who are more serious than me, more literary, more talented, more legitimized.

If I am one (by the grace of my friends who insist I call myself one), I am lowbrow. I don’t have an MFA from a nice school and the words don’t pour out of me in a stream of poetic prose as if I was destined to do this. I was never nurtured in school for writing, never plucked out by a teacher for this, or any unique talent, but this never bothered me until now because until now it didn’t feel real.

Now, upon completion of my first manuscript, I’ve signed with a dream agent who I adore and gets me and my writing more than I could myself. But as I go through submission, get the rejections I was warned (and fully expected) would come, I find myself more and more petrified to continue.

I have edits to do, edits that should be freeing, edits that any other more talented writer should feel ecstatic to tackle, but I am frozen in place. I could type the most unimportant sentence that should be no more than a millisecond for a reader to connect point A to point B, but I’m disgusted by it. Disgusted by each word I choose to put after the next. It’s almost laughable. It took me weeks to bite the bullet and pull this string of words together to you - despite how kindly you’ve addressed every other submission - because I’m so terrified that by reading this, you would see somehow between the lines that I was indeed *not* a writer.

I am so grateful to have gotten this far and know how lucky I am to have done so, especially when so many others haven’t. I know I’m lacking the confidence I should have to do this, and I’m not asking for validation here, but is it really supposed to be this hard?

Dear ____,

I love hearing about the successes of the community at The Reading , including yours. Signing with an agent, finishing a manuscript, and getting through your first round of submissions happen all the time in the publishing industry, but they only happen to you for the first time once. Congratulations.

When you wrote to me, you noted that you were “surrounded by some of the world’s best writers,” reserving the title for those you deemed more worthy than yourself. Real writers, you imply, are “more serious,” “more literary,” “more talented,” and “more legitimized.” Their words pour out, you assume, “in a stream of poetic prose” as though they were “destined” for greatness.

I’ll agree with you on one of these because it’s the basis of all the others. “Real writers” are more legitimized, but let’s not make it passive: literary critics legitimize, editors legitimize, comps legitimize, agents legitimize, prizes legitimize, and MFA programs legitimize. Legitimization is a system that requires every actor to do their share, push that lever, and follow that rule so resources can beget resources. It’s not writers that this system endorses. They—we—aren’t destined for greatness: there’s a complicated apparatus that props us up.

That apparatus works on exclusion. Exclusion is necessary to optimize sales, prestige, and uphold the status quo. Exclusion pulls up that old desire to be recognized and rewarded. The stories we tell about what’s “good” may explain exclusion, but exclusion was always the point. We’re more likely to uphold exclusion when we each have something to gain in its justification, be it a prize to win, praise to receive, fame to accumulate, or money to survive.

____, you’ve been taught all your life to look toward this system of legitimization. Perhaps you even work in publishing for your day job and actively participate in its existence while promulgating its myths. Perhaps you know, intimately, that the exclusions are loosely structural and largely arbitrary, yet your heart pounds and your mind repeats how you’re not a writer. A part of you knows, but another part of you believes otherwise.

I have, for the past several years, called myself a critic. Yet, I’ve only written a few essays and given a few talks here or there, perhaps only a handful of times combined. These past few years, I’d been given opportunities to speak on topics meaningful and urgent to me, but each time, with those deadlines looming, I would always be terrified to begin.

My opportunities, like your edits, become tests of who I am. In a way, it is comfortable not being chosen. Not being chosen means that I don’t have the chance to fail spectacularly. My dreams could neatly stay my dreams, far-off fantasies that always ended with my desired outcomes. But these talks? These deadlines? These audiences? I can’t control them. And I fear most, still, that I will be exposed as the fraud that I believe I am but know I am not.

As you wrote, ____, your rejections were “fully expected.” Perhaps, too, you expected your agent or those editors to give up on you. You expected to be left out again, and though it would be painful, it would at least be something you were used to.

These edits, however, are not something you’re used to. These edits, like my talks, are tests of who you are. For if you succeed in these edits, you might succeed in something else. You might succeed in finishing another draft of your manuscript, you might succeed in selling it, you might, you might, you might. Of course you’re terrified to begin: you’re terrified of finding out who you really are.

Succeeding, ____, would mean facing years of rejection. It would mean that you could no longer be “okay” with being “lowbrow” or not being “plucked out by a teacher.” It would mean giving up dreams you can safely control. It would mean putting yourself in public to be praised, loved, and maligned. But most of all, it would mean aligning who you are with how you move through the world. And revising yourself means revising the world you believe in.

Although you long to call yourself a writer, you’d rather ignore the signs that you already are one. You’re doing this to protect yourself. For you believe that your success is conditional, possibly a fluke. You’re afraid that your manuscript, selected by this agent, commented on by these editors, is the only good piece of writing you’ll ever come up with, and that there’s no more you can do with so much to live up to.

For all those years, you toiled in the background, perhaps even secretly, on this manuscript. You wicked away the subpar sentences; you labored over each character’s voice, each passage’s rhythms. You went over your own work meticulously as though it were a marble sculpture, counting each chisel and polish. Under the cover of anonymity, your words didn’t matter—you could always get another block of stone, a bit more time. Now, you write as though you’re under a spotlight. Now, you write to catch up.

Perhaps you fear you can’t do it again, and that the work you presented was the best it could ever be. Perhaps you resented being given edits and they are not the right edits. You’re avoiding these edits because they would mean going on: and what if the work never ends? What if you’re destined to be lowbrow, never good enough to ascend? What if you are more than that?

Revisions, are meant to help a piece become more like itself. Revisions, too, are tests of who writers are. The best revisions come from readers attuned to what the work offers them, but their suggestions are yours to reject or accept. It is not their gaze that haunts us writers: it is the challenge to act on behalf of our own.

In revisions, you have to explain who you are as a writer, what you value, what you’ll stand up for, what you might change: details as minute as punctuation and as large as characters. You not only have to explain, but you must act, you must try out, you must make against the possibility of failure. There is no such thing as escaping uncertainty: there is only the choice to act in spite of it.

As a writer, the page unfurls before you as a life yet to be lived. The writing changes as you change, some parts disappearing from disuse and others appearing when you most needed them. Trust the land to yield what you cannot see. While doing your best in the present, you need not fear becoming, or failing to live up to, a future you never had control of. It is better this way. Turn the soil. Stay in search of your own perfection, for this is the drive that marks necessary transformation—in art as it is in life.

‘I’m Tired of Working So Hard for So Little.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’m writing to you out of a sense of exhaustion, and anger. A year and a half ago, I graduated from an MFA program. I worked precarious jobs and wrote before entering the MFA. Then I worked a series of part-time jobs throughout the program and after graduating, began working at a full-time corporate company. In April, I managed to finish my first manuscript—a collection of short stories. I was very proud of them in a way that I’m not often proud of or confident in in my own work. I began sending them out to literary agents. Half a year later, I’ve begun receiving the rejections. The main consensus from agents is, they wish I had a novel to sell the book with and want me to requery when I have a novel finished.

I don’t have a novel. I had one, but it’s changed so much, I’ve thrown out so much, and then when I started working full time, spending an hour or two every few days on it just didn’t work for me, which is why I switched my attention to short stories.

Also, I am tired. I didn’t realize how tired I was until I began hearing the rejections. I had been banking on possibly getting an agent and the short stories to open up more doors to me—whether to different fellowship opportunities, teaching jobs, something—to find an opportunity where I could be in the headspace to focus on the novel. I wanted to get an opportunity for me to finally find a space where I could spend MOST of my time thinking about my creative projects. I’m mostly excited about the story itself that I want to write, but I can see that it will take a lot of energy to finish, and will require a lot of focus. The thought of continuing to try to eke it out piece by piece while staying at the same, emotionally exhausting, draining job, and continuing this fight to find time and space for the next couple of years more, makes me feel even more exhausted.

On top of the exhaustion, I feel jealousy and anger, and these are the feelings that are causing me shame. I have cohort peers who graduated the same time I did. Some of them now have agents and book deals. They all wrote novels. A few of the ones with agents and book deals are also the ones who got fellowships or had independent wealth, and so they didn’t have to work while they were in the MFA.

I want to be happy for their successes—writing a book under any circumstances is no easy feat, and some of these people are my friends—but I feel a lot of envy. I wish I had the resources that they had. I wish I had had the time, the recognition by my institution, that someone had given me the space, money, and time so that I, too, could have a novel. I feel resentment at the people who had the privilege to not work for two or more years, and I keep reading into it a strong corollary between that and their current success. I feel angry that when I expressed my sadness at the agent rejections, some of my peers encouraged me, “Just finish your novel and they will be thrilled to sign you!” I know it’s meant as encouragement, but I feel like my situation, my exhaustion, how hard I’ve worked already, is not being recognized.

This has also re-awakened the old part of me that felt chastised I wasn’t deemed “worthy” of the “merit” fellowships at my MFA program, even though I actually really disliked my MFA program, and felt the curriculum, workshops, overall style and ethos, were stifling and nepotistic, and not reflective of my own personal ability or tastes. I also feel tired of the conservatism of publishing in the American market, in taste and in form. I also feel some embarrassment that after working for so many years, all I have to show is a collection of short stories. I feel like I should have more. And I also know that all these feelings are not helpful. Everyone’s situation is unique; it is what it is. But I still feel them.

I have loved your newsletter and so much of what you wrote in the past—about how class informs our work , how to stay true to your own sense of taste and necessity and urgency —and I’m hoping you can help me find some clarity past these emotions which feel like such a burden, and take up so much space in my head.

Yours,
Tired

Dear T,

I’m reading your letter next to the window in my office. It’s been raining all day and what feels like all week, and I’m remembering the days when I would wake up early in the mornings, make coffee, and try to steal a couple hours before work to read or write a little. I’m remembering tearing myself away, late to work again, walking into storms like these, my body aching from not sleeping very well and cold wind smarting against my shins, all while feeling I had left something unfinished in my house.

While reading your letter, I thought about you and I thought about myself, alone, trying to keep believing and working toward a dream while remaining a viable employee at more than one “emotionally exhausting, draining job.” I thought about those days when I wanted more than anything to leave those offices and be free of them all—to be free of places where no one around me saw me as I saw myself.

T, even though we don’t know each other, I believe you and I see how you’ve worked yourself for your dreams. You worked and wrote before your MFA. You worked and wrote through your MFA. You’re working and writing now. Your caretakers didn’t come around and say, Why don’t we give you a break? Your institution didn’t look at your application and decide, Let’s give them a little break. Your job doesn’t see your writing as valuable, so they also won’t say It’s time for you to take a break. And these agents, the ones who might even love your writing, but don’t want the writing you’ve sent them, they didn’t say Hey, let’s get you your big break. You financially supported yourself, all by yourself, perhaps without more than an occasional grumble, because you believed that after finishing a manuscript, you’d be able to catch that break.

Throughout all these years of precarious jobs—perhaps jobs that barely afforded the rent, jobs that worked you to the bone, jobs that didn’t include health insurance—you not only wrote, but you finished a book of short stories you were proud of. That’s amazing and that’s huge. I don’t know what else you’ve gone through. I don’t know how hard it is for you to get to the page or even get out of bed, but I’m proud of you for getting this far, too—I’m proud of you in the way I wished someone else would have been proud of me.

There’s no one out there who told you how lonely it is to be the only person fighting in the name of your dreams. Past the “conservative” industry or the “nepotistic” program you went through is the glimmer of hope that someone, not just you, will recognize who you are: a good writer. A writer worth awards, fellowships, and residencies. A writer who has a good novel in them. A writer, who, if given the time and resources, would be worth the while of others.

You’re tired, T, of proving yourself to people who don’t recognize you. And not only tired, you’re angry. Really angry. Because you feel how unfair it is that your cohort peers had those resources and you had nothing. You feel in your bones the myth of the merit system; you feel an envy rising in you for wealth wrought by generations of genocide and oppression, and there seems to be no recourse for how to rail against it all: that system that benefits your peers who have it.

Beyond this anger and envy, you’re also really scared. You’re scared that all those years of no help, of waking up and wearing yourself down, were for nothing. You’re scared of what all those agents, institutions, and peers are saying when they don’t support you: you’ve failed and you’re nothing. Your writing is nothing. You will never make it and you will never know because no one wants to tell you how bad you really are.

When you wrote about how your friends responded to your sadness around your agent rejections, how they told you to just write the novel, you couldn’t hear their encouragement, which was basically “work harder!” You couldn’t hear how you’ve got more work on your plate. You wanted a break. You’ve needed a break. You needed someone else to appreciate how far you’ve come. You needed someone else to believe with you that your writing is as big as it feels to you on your best days. Perhaps you’re a worker, a survivor, and you’re strong, but even you need, in your darkest hour, someone to remind you that you’ve done enough. Someone to remind you that you will do more.

But not right now. As I read your letter, T, I felt how much you left unsaid. I felt the days that you’d diligently worked, pushed through to work, and I feel how much you can’t do it anymore. During all these years of being told “work harder!” by the people around you, but especially yourself, you pushed through the pain and the complaints. You worked not only to get to your dream: you worked to prove to yourself that you still believed in it.

When I was newly separated from my parents, I had suddenly lost a home. I responded, over the years, by buying lots of furniture. I was constantly working on my apartment, trying to make it as beautiful as possible. Eventually, I had to admit to myself I had too much furniture, but I didn’t want to give anything away. Even though I was keeping extra chairs in my closet, I didn’t want to give up those pieces that had accompanied me through grief; those pieces I had bought to make a home. I was scared to imagine one without them.

My therapist recently brought up “overcorrecting” to me. It’s the idea that in response to the traumas we’ve lived through, we compensate with practices to prevent them from happening again. I’m sure you’re already aware that meritocracy isn’t real, but in capitalism we’re emotionally and materially inured to the idea that if you work hard you’ll be recognized and receive a reward. You’ve worked without a witness. Your writing was your witness. The more you had, the more you could see what you’d gone through. I had lost a home, so I bought too much furniture. What is it that you’ve lost, so you work so much? Who is it that lost you?

Right now, you fantasize about having resources to comfortably write. You fantasize about being given time and recognition. You fantasize about finishing these short stories, getting an agent, then having not all of it, but something. You’re right that it isn’t fair. But it wouldn’t be right, too, for me to just leave you at that.

Right now, you charge your care to the uncertainty of strangers. Take some time away from your creative writing. Write, instead, what’s around you in your life. Who in your life has been there for you and helped you feel listened to? Reach out to them and thank them, and ask how they are. What have you done recently, for fun? Make a point to do something like this for yourself at least once a week (I used to take myself to museums). What time do you have outside of your job? When I couldn’t take off months to go on residencies like my writing peers, I “gave” myself weekend residencies and staycations to write. I rearranged my social calendar. Instead of going out or going away, I preserved my time for myself. It wasn’t much, but two days of complete concentration was better than an hour or two a day.

Walking away from your “productive” writing for a little while isn’t abandonment. It’s not enough to live through your writing, though it is a place where we see and love ourselves. You must free your time. You must give yourself opportunities to celebrate accomplishments as small as taking baths, cooking yourself a lavish meal, spending the evening on the phone or writing letters to friends who really see you. Your writing has seen how hard you’ve worked. Your writing loves you, and wants you to live. And when you’ve done right by your care, your writing will be waiting. It will be as if you’d never left.

‘Am I Too Old to Emerge?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’ve been considering an MFA since I was 19, but let doubt get in my way. By my mid-twenties, I already felt too old. I’m in my thirties now and still can’t shake the desire to do it, to find community and mentorship, to learn (realizing I can do this outside of an MFA, but always with a little less grounding, it’s seemed). Is there any point? Is it too late to be taken seriously as “emerging”? I’m so ambivalent here. Thank you.

Dear ____,

Over the fireplace of an old college dormitory of mine lives this motto: “HOLD FAST TO THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH / LET YEARS TO COME DO WHAT THEY MAY.” Back then, I had the Sappho fragment I’ve included above printed and displayed over my writing desk. Back then, the years began in autumn. I had youth and I was youth. And I had a bundle of dreams I was waiting to lay out in this city that could and would finally hold them all.

The years do come and do as they may. Days passed across faces I would come to cherish, some years later, some for only briefly, as briefly as the weeks and months were forgotten in my discarded calendars. Yet the dreams I brought from youth did not discolor or diminish, but turned out their patinas and scaled as my life expanded and complicated: to bills, to rent, to reckonings, to love. To letting go of families I thought I had and learning to choose families I would always have. The years do come and do as they may.

From my first fellowship to my first book, I’ve benefited and been a part of this idea of the “emerging writer” that you, ____, are afraid that you can no longer be. As I said in the midst of that time, “[an] emerging poet is only emerging to those who call them as such.” This has only become more certain: you are not simply an emerging writer on your own. You must be named as such.

The naming itself, I’m sad to say, might be more of the point than the worth of your writing. This week, I listened to a recent episode from Citations Needed on those 30 Under 30 lists that are lovingly circulated by the press each year. The episode discussed how often those listed had some sort of unmentioned inherited wealth or fame that gave them the resources and time to achieve their success. To the extent that they aren’t from those backgrounds, whether they are immigrants or activists, those more likely to make it to these lists play—or can be convinced to play—in the confines of capitalist interests.

So I advise you (and everyone), to move forward cautiously. To be named “emerging” is to be anointed by someone else as becoming a writer correctly . You are judged as much by your youth as your ability to uphold a social, colonial, and economic status quo. When I was getting acquainted with the poetry industry, I didn’t know many other young writers who weren’t haunted by the looming under-thirty deadline of Poetry ’s Ruth Lilly fellowships. These lists are dangerous because they set deadlines for when one must publish a book, win awards, and make their way before some other, younger, newer writer can grace the stage. They groom writers and writers-to-be to believe, do, and write in particular ways to “emerge” in a well-oiled machine that creates new and noteworthy literary commodities. So long as their honorees continue on their way, the list-makers gain cultural capital and can further a mythology of what successful writers look like by the time they’re thirty—a mythology that requires those list-makers to exist.

It may be that you saw the MFA as the only door to this world. Your hesitance may also be something in you telling you that a program is not quite right for you. Or you have given yourself enough reasons why it won’t work, unconsciously prolonging the wait. I will fast-forward for you: a program would not be perfect. Nor would a life cobbling together an education outside institutions. Trust me, I’ve done both. There is no set of rules for the contours of your education, but that is all the more reason to find one.

For that spirit we associate with youth—I do not miss my naïveté or the way I misunderstood. I miss being close with myself. I miss springing to action in my name only. I miss the mistakes that forced me to decide who I was. The point is to continue writing as surely as you continue breathing. Wherever this desire is, it has been a part of you for a long time. Are you ready to receive it? Are you ready to decide?

Age limits on fellowships and contests are slowly disappearing but the cult of youth remains, at least in the United States. The spirit of youth, however, has as much to do with all this as your dreams did when you were nineteen. Yes, ____, you may be too late to “emerge” for the powers that be. Rather than believing you’ve missed the boat, you’ve simply gotten on another one, one that has included your life up until this point.

Now that you are older, you have held your own life for a little longer than these emerging writers. You’re not so easy to groom or to take on as an investment; you’re not happy to settle for careerism and the status quo. Perhaps, on this other boat, you’ve set your first boundaries with loved ones who have broken your heart; you’ve been tricked; you’ve taken stands for what you cared for; you’ve noticed and redirected your own dogmas; you’ve made a life you can call your own. And although you knew you were a writer, and you call it doubt, it’s possible that you also wanted to know who else you could be. For in the spirit of youth is the dream of living a hundred lives in this one.

With the spirit of youth, on those sharp fall mornings, I remember believing that my life was to be found in that city—that there were people who would understand me, interests that I could follow, networks big enough for the kinds of impact I wanted to make. That in order for my life to mean something, it would have to come from the outside. The outside had reasons for why I should become a businessperson or get a computer science degree. The outside had usefulness, practicality, and social change. So, like you, I turned away from writing. I turned away from its uselessness.

But say the uselessness was the point. Say that writing, ____, is all about being “used” less. There’s no reason to do it. Plenty of people don’t. Yet you find yourself turning toward an uncontainable, endless plain. That plain is yourself. Your desire, your life, without borders. And you’re scared that you’ve gotten here too late. You’re scared that in all that time passed, time when you lived a life that didn’t feel quite your own, you wonder if you are nowhere and will always be nowhere, as you look back at your youth in your singular body, your body that has become unfamiliar.

But you’re as able to shake off this desire to write as you are your own skin. As you write, perhaps for the first time in years, you also feel a kind of love you have not been able to focus here. A kind of love you remember feeling when your world was smaller and simpler and could be made more your own. Writing is the plain you make a hundred times. Writing traces along the time you live. Writing preserves your dreams, practices the future. Writing gives nothing but you in return. It is never too late. Writing is where you emerge.

‘I’m Successful, But I Feel Like a Fraud.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi, I come to you with an issue that I’m not sure can be easily solved. I’m not even sure if it’s exclusive to writing, but I certainly feel it the most when I’m thinking about/focusing on my writing.

I am a freelance writer who publishes cultural criticism as well as fiction, and I think I suffer from imposter syndrome. I am convinced that all I have worked for and have accomplished is the result of mistake, or fluke. I feel deeply relieved when a pitch or submission is rejected. I automatically reject any instances of praise or interest because I feel that it’s not deserved, or that it’s a joke. When I received a personalized note from a well-known writer attached to my acceptance letter for my university degree, I thought it was an error. When a literary agent reached out to me three years ago with an inquiry, I immediately closed the email and didn’t respond, convinced it was spam. (I checked recently; it wasn’t.) With all of my jobs, I felt that I had committed some kind of fraud; that I somehow convinced others that I’m something I’m not. I feel shame and guilt in being able to fool others around me so easily, for taking up a space that I feel should have gone to someone else. Every time I am assigned a story, I have this overwhelming anxiety and belief that I will not be able to complete it.

I’m writing to you as I do realize (maybe) that this is all ridiculous and possibly untrue, but I still cannot shake it. I find that I can motivate myself to write (miraculously), but once the words are on the page, the self-doubt begins. It complicates everything. Because my fiction is about diaspora identity and Hong Kong, where I live, I struggle with issues of authenticity (“you’re pretending to be someone you’re not”) and permission (“you’re a nobody and you haven’t lived here your whole life; you don’t get to write about this place”). In my cultural criticism, I worry that I am perpetuating tokenism; that because I am Chinese and female and living in Asia, editors in the US or Europe can check boxes when they assign me pieces.

I feel there is such a large disconnect between this internal part of me that loves and wants to write, and another part of me that is connected to the exterior world and to external value and capitalist definitions of usefulness, to all of these anxieties and fears and rage. Because I publish slowly and don’t readily talk about my work or my writing unless asked, many of my closest friends and relatives are of the opinion that I don’t do anything all day. Some have even pointed this out to me, directly or indirectly. I am so afraid that this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have tried to, weakly, assert myself in situations where I am asked who or what I am. But how can I truly do that, when I don’t even really believe myself?

I’d really appreciate any advice you might have. I love your writing.

Sincerely,
A Lonely Imposter

Dear ALI,

Thank you for writing to me all the way back in July. I have been saving your letter because, I admit, I didn’t know exactly how I could help you at the time. I still don’t know exactly what I’m about to say, but I hope whatever comes out will be of use to you, whatever your situation has become (or remains).

From here, I can’t judge what exactly your work means to you. I do know, however, that you might feel like a fake because the work you’re writing doesn’t actually matter to you. You feel pulled, perhaps, to writing all these “useful” articles that don’t activate or realize the potential you see for yourself. Something could be off between the person whose life you’re moving through and the person you know yourself to be.

I’m going to assume, however, that the things you’re writing feel true to you, and you’re having trouble reconciling the recognition you’re getting. As far imposter syndrome goes, you’re far from alone. Right now, I’m in the midst of writing a talk that I feel deeply unqualified to speak on. For months, the mere thought of the talk has thrown me into a spiral that I can only describe as overzealous prepping.

Even though I think of myself as a critic and know myself as one, the moment I have the opportunity to really assume that authority, I lose all composure. A loud voice screams at me about how I never studied English or Asian American studies or queer studies. Another one wrings its hands at the prospect of bringing something to class and to have students or colleagues laugh in my face about a misinterpretation or, even worse, denounce me for having the wrong politics for a subject. This all leads to that overzealous prepping that I was talking about: I want so much to get it right. My assumption is that I’m all wrong.

The voices in your head, the ones telling you that you’re an imposter of the place you live in and an inexperienced one at that, seem like they would be friends with the voices in my head. If we’re anything alike, you’ve already done your own version of prepping, searching for the cure of what to do with your imposter syndrome every month or so, so I’ll fast-forward the advice you know I’m going to give you—let yourself be imperfect. Right? Right.

Except none of these advice columns do us the favor of telling us exactly what being imperfect looks like and how this “letting” is supposed to happen. Because you and I still live in a world to which we are responsible to each other. Where we wish to do no harm. Where we hope to make something of ourselves one day. The good neoliberal in you is left to assume that your attitude is the problem, and it just reinforces this story from the very beginning: there’s a right way to do something, and you’re the only one who doesn’t know how.

So let’s break down your imposter syndrome even further. You’re afraid of being seen and read by others, as is shown by the examples you’ve listed in your letter. You feel trapped under the gaze of your family and friends, who think you do nothing all day, then the gaze of the reading public, who might accuse you of tokenizing yourself.

That’s the thing about being wrong: it only ever matters in the eyes of others. It’s easy to be imperfect away from the public eye. If you trip and no one sees, who cares but yourself? Perhaps that’s why you’re able to get a few words down before the self-doubt sets in, as you describe in your letter. But the moment when someone is looking, like an agent interested in signing with you or the moment you realize that your words can be read by other people, your imposter syndrome kicks in.

It’s not just a personal thing. If you were socialized as a woman, you were socialized to be an image before you were a person. Women, as John Berger wrote about in Ways of Seeing, must internalize a double consciousness of being both subject and object. “Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated” [1].

If your worth to someone else has ever depended on being charming enough, well-behaved enough, or (especially) pretty enough to keep around, you’ll know what I mean. Systemic oppressions like patriarchy flow in the veins of communities. It’s not just a future husband who judges you: it’s family, it’s friends, and when you’re a public figure, it’s also strangers of all genders who will be upholding expectations of how you’re supposed to speak, move, and live. You’re never right. You’re always wrong. And every day, there’s someone in the crowd who’s more than eager to put you in your place, whatever that means or takes.

If you’ve lived your entire life with this kind of surveillance, it’s not outlandish to deduce how your focus on your image is a strategy of survival. You anticipate what others will do to you in a patriarchal, racist world. Your imposter syndrome is a shield that wants you to run back to safety, where you can’t be seen and your mistakes can’t be wielded against you.

Perhaps you feel relief when you are rejected because your only experience of public life is surveillance. When you’ve been told all your life to wait for others to judge you before you judge yourself, you can’t receive these opportunities in good faith. Prove it, they say. Maybe you’re good at proving yourself. Maybe you duck and run at any sign of being scrutinized. Imposter syndrome is the reflex of fixing uncertainty with the authority of others. So where do you find certainty when you yourself are asked to be that authority?

You probably have a dream that in a few years, you will be a successful writer with dazzling awards and publications. Because the awards and publications are there, you might imagine that all your troubles with imposter syndrome will go away once you finally get those “right” pieces down. In other words, once you are successful as a writer, your problems will be solved. I must say that this is a fantastic piece of publicity on the side of the publishing and creative writing industry. I’ve been fascinated by this other passage from Ways of Seeing since I read it:

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. [2]

In the writer’s case, the product being sold to us is becoming a successful writer. You know the price: writing retreats, workshops, submission fees, graduate programs, self-help books, and manuscript consultations. The point of this publicity is that there is never enough expertise you can buy, never enough degrees you can earn, to claim your place at the table. The more you feel like an imposter, the longer you do, the better business booms.

Imposter syndrome hits when you’re no longer treated like an object in need of improvement. Someone asks you what you think. Someone gives you a compliment. Someone accepts your work and wants you to write more. And the certainty of other authorities give way to uncertainty —because there’s a voice inside you unlike anyone else’s. It’s the voice you hear right before you put your words to the page; the voice you’ve learned to betray and ignore; the voice who thinks and feels that what comes from only you is worth beholding, cherishing, and sharing with us all.

I wish, ALI, that I could give you some catch-all advice about being imperfect or learning how to believe in yourself. The truth is, aligning yourself with your own authority is a never-ending process of failure and belief. You must give yourself a chance to fail in order to have a chance to believe. Leave the uncertainty to the world, when it comes to it, and have compassion for yourself when you fail. Write back to that agent. Thank that famous writer. Give yourself the chance to be remembered. Believe that they—and we—want to hear from you, just long enough to get things done.

The journey doesn’t start with believing in yourself. You enact one glimmer of the future today to prove that it’s possible tomorrow. You are not an imposter, but a person figuring out how to become who you are. Like an unwritten sentence, your life calls to you from the future just out of your grasp. You may hear the music but fail to make out the words. No matter. Just write to the rhythm. The words you choose will carry the song. Live it, and it will come.

Notes

[1] Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972, page 46.
[2] Ibid., page 134.

‘When Will I Know That I’m Good Enough?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’m sure you have received this question in multiple different forms. Here I am, asking you the most common question in writing history, probably. How do you know if you’re ready for an MFA program? I’ve continued writing while working full time, workshopped my stories to constructive criticism and positive feedback, and have studied craft on my own time. This gave me confidence, until I started submitting my work. I’ve been rejected left and right from literary journals. I’ve even been rejected from advanced fiction writing classes. Every form rejection says the selection was “subjective” and I shouldn’t take it personally. But it’s still a huge punch to my confidence. Even though I have prepped and believe I have a strong, distinctive writing sample, the rejections make me believe I shouldn’t even try to apply to an MFA program. How will I ever know if I’m good enough?

Thank you so much for your kind wisdom.

Best,

Scared and Unconfident Child, Probably

Dear SUCP,

First, I want to commend you for not only writing but continuing a whole curriculum on writing while holding down a full-time job. Capitalism has its seersuckers deep in us. It takes an incredible amount of drive, ambition, and luck to keep yourself out of its grip long enough to do what you’ve been doing.

I laughed when you framed the MFA question as “the most common question in writing history, probably.” Because it probably is in frequency, at least. MFA programs are totally new concoctions from the post-WWII era (you can find some links in a previous MFA letter ). If I were to workshop your letter, I’d gravitate more toward your second question: “How will I ever know if I’m good enough?” For there’s no such thing as being “ready for an MFA”—plenty of people apply and get into them right out of undergrad or, if you’re like me, after years of working on writing mostly outside of the academy and the elusive curriculum that would have told me how to write things “right.” You seem to fall into the latter, though I won’t forego the possibility that you studied writing formally too.

Now, let’s get into your letter: you write that you’ve been getting rejected all over from literary journals and even advanced fiction workshops, it’s been sucking the confidence out of you, and you’re discouraged from even applying to MFAs right now. I know a few people who immediately delete the rejections they receive; others will keep them as reminders of how far they’ve come.

Imagine what it looks like if you were watching from the outside: we writers send these all these applications into the ether and wait, three months or more after sending, for a slow avalanche of rejections to pop into our inboxes at random, periodic self-esteem whack-a-moles. The fact that we don’t receive them at the same time only elongates and exacerbates the suffering, like the risk of prying open doors that mostly plan on smacking us in the face.

If you’re getting quite a few rejections, I encourage you to stop sending things out for the time being. Not because your work is no good and not because you don’t believe you can keep going, but because you might want to question why you are. Stopping is not a sign of weakness: it’s a technique of attention. Namely, the attention you’re giving to yourself rather than the goals you’ve set in front of you.

You are going to hear the opposite advice, something along the lines of submissions are a numbers game , everywhere else. This is true to a point. Today, there are more literary magazines than you will be able to publish in in your lifetime. The question of getting published isn’t a matter of if , it’s a matter of when , and it’s more in figuring out where your work might be read well and appreciated rather than chasing the tails of prestige.

From your letter, I can tell that you have drive. Perhaps you’ve very good at comprehensively reviewing the field and making decisions from there. Perhaps you like to set your goals before your feet have even touched the ground. And so you know which literary magazines are the most challenging markets to get into; you know which writers are the most famous, which institutions make the top-of creative writing lists, and you mark your progress by which publications, fellowships, and medals you hope to add to your bio before you dare call yourself a writer. No matter what goal you reach, you can’t celebrate, for there’s another one on the horizon to strike at next.

Now, if you’re like this, then your sense of confidence will be directly rigged to your CV. Every rejection becomes much worse than what it is: it’s a measure of your worth as a writer; it’s permission to consider your writing worth paying attention to. You’re looking for a praise from a parent who rarely comes home. You’re staying at a job that promises you a raise soon, but always maybe next cycle . You’re writing to a lover who leaves your messages on read. You’re used to working far past what’s normal to get a small dose of acknowledgement; you mistake your suffering for diligence. Stop. You’re a seed trying to root in shifting sand. You deserve to be embraced by ground that not only tolerates you, but wants you.

For if you think of your writing in terms of progression, you probably look at your career in terms of a pyramid: the writing you do for yourself at the bottom, then getting published in magazines, then publishing a book, then getting fellowships and awards at the very top. If you believe in prestige, you’ll automatically look at writing programs and magazines in this way too. From the note that you’ve been applying to advanced fiction workshops, I assume that you’ve been doing this for a while but you’ve hit a ceiling of some sort in this progression and you don’t know why. You assume it’s the quality of your work only—there are far more factors.

Most of us who were successful in school or work have gotten there by very carefully following an imposed structure for our time and energy. Being able to accomplish all of those milestones—think of those 30-under-30 lists—are supposed to mark us not only as “writers” or “adults” but also just “normal.” And at the end of all those milestones, at the end of getting that long series of checkmarks, is the idea that we are “good.” To reach our potential is “good.” To go “above and beyond” is “good.” To proactively edit ourselves and our needs; to be silent; to be convenient; to fit exactly what someone wants without them even having to tell us. We follow the instructions of “goodness” from the moment we can understand what it promises—control of our bodies and minds for access to community; access to comfort; access to love.

“Goodness” steels the frame of a biased economic and social order with a moral disguise. To free yourself from the impulse to hierarchy within yourself—constantly putting your work up next to others’ and asking Is it better? Is it good enough? —you must free yourself from goodness. Neither will do you any good on the page. They don’t do much off of it, either, beyond wasting the time you could have been reading, writing, and living.

It is practical to get a sense of what exists today not secondhand but directly. If you’re like me and you have a tremendous energy for prep, as it sounds like you do, throw out those “best stories of all time” and “secrets to submitting” listicles. Stop writing for a little while. Read widely and seriously across time and space based on your curiosity, not someone else’s curation. In fact, get involved in the community at the other side of the table if you can. Working as an editor will force you to read differently and exactly as I’m encouraging you to do. If you look around, you’ll find that there is not one, but many kinds of writing alive not only today, but always.

Contemporary writing is not so much a pyramid from “indie” to “mainstream” or “bad” to “good” writing but a garden of ongoing arguments and traditions. How does your writing live in that garden? To whom and what will you speak to next? The more you know of this world, the more your own tastes, desires, and wants will change. Your writing will transform not for better or for worse, but toward complexity and maturity. Do not so much present yourself to be judged by others as judge where you belong among them. Literature exists in the writing of it. Everything else is an afterlife.

‘How Do I Feel Less Lonely?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi Yanyi, thank you for sharing your financial journey on Twitter . It really made me think about my current IT career. My question is: how does one deal with the utter loneliness of writing after one has held a conventional job? I have savings, my husband earns decent money, and I can afford to write full time for a year. However, I don’t know how to live without a job, without team work, without that monthly acknowledgment at least in form of salary...How does one build a writing life in a capitalist society where everyone else is producing goods and services marked with clear monetary value and you are holed up in a room with a fancy idea? How does one convince oneself that words are enough (given that I have money to survive a year)? Where does one meet people and live some form of social life? Thank you for your generosity.

Melbourne

Dear ____,

Before dawn, where I am, the sun hints with a barely-lavender wash behind a nearby church tower. The color drapes on all walls of this house as I close the bedroom door, ripples into the living room as I open the curtains. Usually, at this time, no cars venture on the street, not for a couple more hours. I make coffee then sit on the couch and read until the lavender becomes more lavender, less shadow, then gold—the true color of a morning page.

Every so often, I live this vision of idyllic solitude. I am awake and not over-caffeinated. I like the book I’m reading. I am not yet hungry. No appointments to make. No deadlines to meet. No hours of work tugging the sleeve of my attention. “Solitude and freedom are the same,” says Agnes Martin. “[Suffering] is necessary for freedom from suffering,” she also says.*

You are asking, practically, about how to find community as a writer, so I will answer this first. Writing communities function like any other community. They are made of people with a common interest, but whose beliefs and values may be wildly different besides that. The more you approach and invest in other people, the more people might do the same in turn. Book clubs, workshops, and events are the easiest ways to meet others. Outside of pandemics, going to events is a quick way to find others who might be interested in the same kinds of writing as you—curating them is a quick way to find out what you yourself are interested in.

If you’re feeling lost right now in terms of structure, finding a workshop with an instructor, rather than a community workshop, may be the best bet. When you are feeling more confident in your work, I also recommend applying to fellowships with cohorts with whom you might bond during your time together. And throughout all this, I recommend seeking lasting friendships in which you genuinely value each other beyond fame, fortune, and even whether you continue in the art. Community, in other words, is still made of the same stuff even when there’s an adjective in front of it.

I want to turn, now, to the anxiety of being the one with the “fancy idea.” Many of us don’t have the luxury of risk. We don’t get to be “mavericks” or “pioneers”—we’re born indebted to bigger things, often by duty, whether it’s needing to pay our parents’ electric bills or avoiding the state and social consequences of not fitting in. The thought of sticking out and doing something completely different—risk is a privilege. Risk could mean less freedom, not more. Yet, risk may be one choice, if not the only choice, you have in order to create the life you want to live.

Writing is a lonely path, but perhaps not in the ways that you think. It’s true: most of the time I spend on writing, I’m alone, but I’m dogged by the memories of what has happened yesterday, or the day before. My friends’ voices and the voices of the books I’m reading, the voices of strangers and the dead, not mutually exclusive, are ringing as clear as the church bells dancing on the hour. Writing is something you do alone, yes. But as you live, the world lives in you. And the moment you write, you offer an echo of that life that dares to live beyond even you.

In that empty room you fear, the life you’ve built until now doesn’t seem to have prepared you for anything you will have to do from now on. Where does community come from, without a team? Where does acknowledgement come from, without a quarterly reviews? Where does life come from, without a plan?

All your life, these plans have been made for you, tacked in place by promises of failure if you step out of line. You’ve been taught to prove it, not to believe it. That you need to sound correct rather than like yourself. That you’re not a source of knowledge, but a project to be improved. But toward what and for whom? You have been taught, in other words, to never make your own meaning. You have been written out of your own life. No wonder you’re afraid of what you’ll do if you have no one else to watch you.

____, you wrote to me about loneliness of writing after having a conventional job. It is not, as you suggested, the loneliness of wanting to write. It is not the loneliness of needing money. But even the things you fear—the loneliness of being the one wanting the “fancy idea,” the loneliness of needing acknowledgement, or the loneliness of wanting a community—they are real, but they knock at the same door of loneliness through which you must pass when you choose to be a writer.

The loneliness of a writer is that of having chosen something completely for yourself. It is the loneliness of many mornings or nights writing words that you hate or fear. It is the loneliness of not yet being able to love them. It is the loneliness of setting your own pace of how you should write, when you should write, what you should write, and whether you should write. It is the loneliness of entering an empty room in the morning. It is the panic, the terror, of not yet having a start, a place, a role, a preset meaning for what you are doing. It is the loneliness of responsibility, of finally having the time you wanted, of finally being alone, but alone with the doubt, perhaps, that you are not who you wanted to be.

That is: a writer. As a writer, when your needs are met, your loneliness is about caring for your life, seeing its potential, and guiding its direction. As a writer, you will be lonely because you alone have your vision. The room is empty, the page is blank, and no one will swoop in to reassure you that you are doing the right work; no one will love your work in your place. You are your only original. You’ll have to do. You do.

As writers, we have to not only invent ourselves anew but the worlds in which we dream of living. The first story we write is not the one we set on the page: it’s the one where we tell ourselves about who we are, who we can be, and what we dare our lives to be. It is gradually telling ourselves Do you dare? instead of How dare you.

In that empty room, against time both endless and short, do you dare remember what the world told you to forget? Do you dare survive when you were told to die? Do you dare to ask yourself how you want to live? The confidence to offer worlds to others comes from the tenacity of following yourself into the sun. “[Suffering] is necessary for freedom from suffering,” Martin says, for that suffering is learning how to let go of who you once planned to be in order to become who you were told to abandon: yourself.

Yesterday, while responding to a prompt about food, I wrote about my father teaching me to make 番茄炒蛋 for the first time. The memories of tomatoes and eggs at that time now live with all the memories of tomatoes and eggs: eggs, but more perfectly. Tomatoes, but more perfectly. Even my father. I started writing the story I always write about him, the story I long told myself in order to live with being disowned. But the prompt encouraged me instead to remember this other side of him, the story of quiet patience while I put the eggs in the pan; how he sprinkled salt over the tomatoes and put the lid over them to steam. The memory of my father’s love appeared next to that rote memory of his fears. In the end, it is better, because I received him more as himself.

For there are always more sides to the story. Always more to go back for. When you become another version of yourself, you do not abandon your other selves. You become yourself more perfectly. And in this, you, alone, are perfect.

‘I Hate Hating When My Friend Gets Ahead of Me!’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I recently discovered The Reading and I’ve read all your advice, and I’ve screenshotted a lot of “I Can’t Build a Daily Habit”, which is what I needed so much to hear, especially the part about trusting that your own work is enough. I’ve struggled with it since I’ve started writing (and in activities other than writing). I don’t know if it’s how I naturally am, or the way I’ve been taught, but I have a fierce, poisonous urge to compare and to compete, which worries me.

Recently, a friend of mine, younger than me, has just published in a magazine. I worked with her for weeks on that piece, and it is very good, and I respect and like her, as a friend and as a writer, but even when I’m writing these complimentary words I feel so unbearably angry. You can say it’s a mix between jealousy and resentment, with an aftershock of guilt. I can feel happy for people if they are achieving less than me, or if they are on a totally different path (for example, I’m never angry at my poet friends for their achievements, because in my mind, we’re not competing for the same prizes), but if someone is on the same career track and in approximately the same social position as I am and gets “ahead” of me, I’m furious.

I think this is partly because of the way I was raised and educated, as well as the way that literary success is set up to promote a scarcity mindset, but also because I do have a bit of an inferiority complex when I’m with my fellow writers. They talk about going to creative writing programs in the summers and applying to MFAs as if it’s nothing. I never heard of an MFA before I went to college, and I never wrote a single story before my sophomore year. Which I realize is still pretty young, but it doesn’t feel like it when I’m surrounded by confident, wealthy U.S. citizens who have spoken English since birth and have always been told they can do anything they want to. When I’m with them, I feel small and insignificant and fearful, as if I’ve started the race ten years too late and with my feet hobbled. I feel so desperate when I think about my future and so scared when I’m in a so-called writing “community”, that I lash out internally when I perceive that somebody has passed me by, because that means I’m losing again. It’s not so much that I think somebody less deserving or less needful has gotten a piece of the limited pie (though there is some element of that), but moreso that feeling one gets when you’re running with all your might and you can’t manage more than limp, and someone passes you easily and naturally, and you’re left shuffling after them as they move further and further away.

That’s how I comfort myself, too, when someone “passes” me on the race. They started earlier, I tell myself, or they’ve had advantages that I didn’t. And I don’t like thinking like that, and I feel this resentment inside me is a time bomb, which will eventually hurt my friendships and myself, even though I keep these feelings very well concealed.
I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s gotten worse and worse and I’m afraid of it. It’s not the right mentality to take at all, but I don’t know how to even start getting out of it. I feel ashamed writing this down at all, but I hope you can help me, and maybe other people like me. I’ve never seen any writer addressing this problem before, so I don’t really know where to turn.

Thank you so much for your time and thoughtfulness! Even if you don’t respond to this, it did help a little to write it all down. So thank you, too, for giving me the space to articulate the problem and ask for help.

Warmly,
Last Place Runner
Chengdu, China

Dear LPR,

Thank you for writing to me about something so vulnerable and difficult to talk about. No one wants to be the one with “poisonous” feelings, especially when you’re judged so viciously in society for being anything but virtuous. You’ve not only voiced your struggles with “ugly” feelings, but I can tell you’ve also thought a lot about them.

You write so extensively on your own guilty pattern, but there’s little in your letter that actually describes what went down with your friend. You mention that you “worked with her for weeks on that piece,” and I’m wondering what the nature of your collaboration was. It could be that you gave her some feedback on how the piece was going, your reflections on it, and some revision suggestions, or did you go further than that? The part that makes me pause is “weeks.” How many weeks was it, exactly, and how many hours in those weeks? Did you go as far as to rewriting sentences and passages for her? If you did, there’s a fine line between helping, collaborating, and even ghostwriting a piece for someone. If your friend won a prize for what you wrote without crediting you, your resentment might be justified.

Perhaps you love to help others to the point that you would drop your own goals in order to help someone else succeed. This over-generosity is a residual habit of gendered labor for me—having been told that my worth is my service to others, I prioritized pleasing others over giving my energy to myself. Cultural hegemony told me that I was a woman before I was an individual. My worth was judged as such.

The other angle of looking at your situation is to assume that your friend won this prize and there wasn’t intense collaboration between you two. This is the angle from which you wrote to me and that I’ll mainly respond to here. In a way, there’s not much different between the two situations, because both of them involve your possibly feeling unacknowledged and misunderstood.

You’re not sure where your resentment comes from, whether it’s “natural” or “taught,” but you know that you feel shame when this anger and resentment flow through you. You know to mention a “scarcity mindset” when reflecting how these feelings may have been taught but also blame yourself for having an “inferiority complex,” which perhaps makes it difficult to comfort yourself despite what you know about structural inequality and the challenges, especially, of immigrating to a place where generational wealth, connections, race, and primary language all work in concert to privilege white settlers in the States.

It’s curious that you’ve handed me an analysis of yourself with ease, but the conclusions you’ve made seem neat when the feelings you describe are far from that. In your letter, you call them “jealousy and resentment, with an aftershock of guilt.” I wonder, after all that analysis of how good or bad of a person you are, if you’ve been able to face your jealousy and resentment and listen to what they’re trying to tell you?

The feelings you’re experiencing are normal and not just because it’s common to be jealous or resentful. “Ugly” feelings appear when they are needed. Consider the fact that the first communication we receive from a newborn is a cry. Crying is how babies, without an ability to speak complexly, get the things they need. We humans are wired to take care of crying babies. Most of us have an instinct to figure out what’s going on. In those moments, these cries are judged as neither good nor bad. Although we can’t hear directly what the baby needs, we try out different ways to soothe them until their need get met. In other words, when the baby cries, we listen until we understand.

In our world, there’s no caretaker who can always understand a baby’s cries. We humans also get exhausted and irritable, and even more so when the pressure of survival rests on our shoulders from unforgiving jobs and expected and gendered invisible labor. Perhaps your caretakers tried, but they couldn’t understand you in the way you needed. You may have been punished as a child for acting out when you cried. While you were trying to communicate, you may have been punished or even ignored, locked into a closet to muffle your screams. Whatever you were trying to say to make things better for yourself or to be understood, it wasn’t listened to. Every time you tried to inch toward what you needed, you were judged and shamed. Now you shame yourself.

As an adult, you’ve learned to put away all your ugliness into closets too. One closet is named “inferiority complex.” Another is “scarcity mindset.” Perhaps you feel guilt after you slam the door in the face of jealousy and resentment not because you’re a bad person for feeling them, but because you were only given the tools and inertia to trap yourself in the closet you so desperately wanted—and want to—escape.

Although I don’t know the numbers, my parents were one of the few in the generation before mine who were not only able to go to college, but also managed to immigrate to another country for graduate school. My mother often didn’t have money for shoes; my father used to live in poverty on a farm and left home when he was twelve. For them, their ability to escape these circumstances hinged on what they were able to achieve from tests. There was no room for anything else after the generation before them had had their entire ways of life decimated and transformed by civil war and uprising. And they were a generation after conflict; whole swathes of the world immigrated to the States as refugees from it. When it came time for them to teach me my own skills of survival, they couldn’t teach me what they had never learned to do.

My extended family lives not far from where you wrote me some weeks ago. Over summers in Sichuan, I watched my cousins study night after night to compete for spots in the “right” primary school to the get the “right” middle school, and so on. Their competition is real. The competition you’re feeling in the literary industry is real too. As I mentioned in my answer last in The Writing on MFA vs NYC, the main asset of going to an MFA program is access to professors who can write you references that are used in the idiosyncratic fellowship and grant system that much of the arts are based on. This system prioritizes generational wealth and social hierarchy while marketing itself as a meritocracy. All those factors that you mentioned of your peers: being US citizens, wealthy, knowing early on about MFA programs—these give a head-start in that game. So no, you don’t have a black heart. Your anger, at least some of it, is justified.

During times when I’m stressed out, I have a recurring dream where I feel unbearably angry and open my mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. My voice tries to burst my chest, but to no avail. This same dream can turn, too, into that image that ends your letter, where my feet are being dragged down when I’m trying desperately to run as fast as I can.

Even writing about these memories, my heart is starting to pound and my throat starts to close up a little. The overwhelming feeling of these dreams was the overwhelming reality of my life at the time: the decisions I was making didn’t truly feel like my own. I felt out of control. And I suspect you might be experiencing something of the same.

Like the crying child in the closet, you’re waiting for someone else to hear you so your true self can emerge from the shadows. The more you fear and push away your feelings, the more misunderstood you will continue to feel. Remember: you’re no longer the child. You’re the adult who can open the door.

You’re afraid of these feelings because you don’t know what to do with them and you don’t know what harm they’d possibly cause. You’re afraid because you don’t know if you’d lash out at your friends directly, disparage them behind their backs, or passive-aggressively work to sabotage them. You can work these out, safely, with a therapist who you trust. I often use the metaphor of a well to describe those overwhelming feelings: looking down at them, they can seem endless. But if you keep pulling them up, bucket by bucket, you’ll eventually dry the well. The feelings will ebb and flow less and less until one day they’ll appear more proportionately to your experiences.

You’re in last place in this race, and all the energy you’ve put into running is depleting the energy you have for yourself. You’re in last place in this race, and keeping your eyes on the finish line is keeping your attention away from your tired knees, your screaming shins, and the burn that’s threatening to engulf your lungs. You’re in last place in this race, but have you ever noticed that around the race, there are other things going on too? People cheering from the stands, some even hidden away behind the bleachers, completely oblivious to who’s first, second, or last?

So much of what we’re told, as children, is that the story ends as we grit our teeth and shut our eyes to the dark. As we keep going in the race. As adults, we write the chapter after that. Will you open the door? Will the crowd part and lift the barricades; will your weights be undone and your feet restored? And when you run, will there be no path you need to follow? And will you feel lost before you feel free? Let it. Let in the world of your life on your terms. Let it be anywhere.

‘I Can’t Bring Myself to Write Anymore.’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you so much for this platform, and for taking out the time and energy to answer questions and offer your experience and advice to readers.

I graduated from an MFA program in 2017 and am now pursuing my PhD. I haven’t published anything, and increasingly feel like i keep coming back to school to avoid the “real work” of producing/publishing meaningful and well-crafted work. I suddenly find this path lonely without mentors or friends with the same long-term goals. My family and friends are all very supportive and loving. I feel ungrateful for wishing I had a team and a coach/mentor especially since in high school and college I felt comfortable and happy enough to work on my own. I wasn’t so much a team player then, and was happy that my friends had similar interests even if they didn’t have the same goals. Now, whether for a lack of confidence and internal motivation or because I’ve changed and now want to be part of a team, I find myself most times unable to write or study. All of the goals of my childhood (which have been consistent for more than 20 years of my life) suddenly feel almost worthless. I am still passionate about literature, and still write creatively—but its not at the pace I want, and certainly not the quality I want.

Many days just blocking off these thoughts and working in spite of myself does the trick, but some days, like this week, I can’t bring myself to do anything.

Any thoughts you have on overcoming any of these issues would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

R

Dear R,

I received your letter around the time I was writing this week’s kickoff to the MFA series of The Writing. So much of what you’ve talked about—the MFA, the supportive community now gone, and going to school for your PhD—came up in my answer. There, I said that it’s important not to run away from the responsibility of creating your own structures in life. I’m going to say that again, but with one big caveat.

Not knowing you personally, having a reassuring, external structure to your life in your community and in school may have meant you didn’t have to work so hard if you wanted to get some reassurance or guidance around your writing, even if no one else had similar goals. You had a social (and maybe other) safety nets and it sounds like you’re aware of that and grateful for them.

I can’t tell exactly from your letter if your friends have changed—still similar interests but dissimilar long-term goals, or just different people?—but I can tell that something has changed for you. For whatever reason, whatever you were reaching for when you were able to stake it out on your own in the past has disappeared. Although not much has changed in your immediate life, whatever ambitions that you had laid before yourself now seem “worthless” and you think that only you have changed, so you blame yourself with lack of “confidence” or “motivation” or even the fact that you want to be part of a team.

But here’s my caveat. Things have changed. Making art requires energy on top of energy in this world. When your life changes, the writing will always tell you first. It—the real stuff—can’t be reduced to a daily churn of words on a page to be dashed to a printer. It can’t be made by staring at the same spreadsheets, looking out the same window, or repeating the same beliefs that have held nations in their places for centuries in the past. Turn a stone however many times you want: it won’t transform into a jewel.

As I write to you, the world around us is crumbling. Over the past week alone, police let a white 17-year-old teenager—a year away from getting a police badge, a weapon, and qualified immunity himself—murder two people right before our eyes. They claimed that he was “resolving a conflict” only days after they shot the unarmed Jacob Blake seven times in the back after he was actually trying to resolve a conflict. August 27 was Toyin Salau ’s birthday. A tropical storm and hurricane barreled through the Gulf of Mexico back-to-back while California is still burning. We found out that Chadwick Boseman was hiding a fight with colon cancer so he could bring so many action films to life in the past four years. We are several months into quarantining from a pandemic without a vaccine and the leaders who are supposed to help everyone through all of these catastrophes don’t even believe they’re happening, don’t care, and are making matters so much deadlier.

Of course your goals seem worthless right now. Goals exist where you can touch your loved ones, visit them at the hospital, and send them off after death. Goals exist in a future where we can still breathe the air outside. Goals exist in a world where you’re still alive.

Art, when it is genuine, is an embodied practice. Your goals seem worthless right now because your body is feeling no viable future in which it may exist. The present is overwhelming all time now. And in our present, in our moment, the overwhelming truth seems to be that we are not only alone but alone on a march to the end of the world with death as its inevitable conclusion.

Last fall, my therapist introduced me to an expansion of the cycle of fight-or-flight, the changed state of the body during an extreme stress response: freeze. The analogy I read about later, online, was of an antelope who goes limp after being captured by a lion. It knows it’s going to die: why not just go limp, or go to sleep, and let the end be a little less painful?

Freeze, more than fight or flight, explained what I had been doing for most of my life in harmful episodes of my life. Rather than running away or fighting dangerous emotional situations, I resigned (back into the closet, back into my headphones) and my body helped me survive by kicking up my dissociation and fatigue. I resigned because I felt powerless. And I got into the habit of giving up early because the struggle seemed too large for me to ever win on my own.

Perhaps, R, your hypotheses are right, and you can’t work on your goals because you’re not motivated or confident. Perhaps you look out your window or check the news and your confidence and motivation are being swept away in the floodwaters of cynical self-interest and systemic genocide. Perhaps you look at the goals you made twenty years ago, in a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and you don’t know how you’ll reach them in this world that you don’t yet know. Perhaps, though you don’t say this in your letter, you are missing the person you once were, before all this, the person who had, without effort, all that ambition and hope.

Maybe, like me, you’ve grown tired of being “resilient” and “strong.” Maybe you’ve grown tired of speaking and thinking about these disasters as veiled obstacles to endure and move on from to go back to “normal.” Maybe you’ve grown tired of reaching backward, in nostalgia or mandatory customer service, using your energy to be a person who doesn’t exist anymore.

We’ve reached a point where upholding normalcy is not—and has never been—the point. The world around us is not crumbling, it is transforming. You and I are part of it. We too are becoming the future. But right now we’re living in two worlds: one that’s disappearing and another that’s just about to emerge.

In the world that’s disappearing, we imagined life in occupations. Writers produce words, so the life of the writer is the moment when the words are written. This is what propels the idea that writers thrive in remote cabins, seaside cottages, or the itinerant, chain-smoking solitude of the cooped-up East Village apartment with only a mattress on the floor, as mythological as fairies. But myths don’t eat, don’t breathe, and don’t have loved ones. Myths aren’t alive.

If you think the only things that affect your writing practice are at your writing desk and your immediate community, you’re trying to live, still, in an old-world fairytale. We can’t escape the world; we bring it to our writing. Boundaries emerge in crisis. And it’s this crisis of privacy—private land, private control, private responsibility—all these beliefs that fuel capitalism and neoliberal ideas of how to be, that are starting to feel half-baked. For it can be terrifying to realize there’s no great escape at the end of the work day. It can be terrifying to understand there’s no privacy sealed off from the public, for it’s not each other we’re supposed to escape from but the myth that we were ever alone.

In the last sections of Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt writes extensively on loneliness and its part in totalitarian states. There, she is careful to specify that loneliness and solitude are not the same things. While both are a kind of being alone, solitude is time with oneself that always includes the possibility and existence of others. Loneliness is an isolation where there is no “you” among whom “I” exists.

What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.*

In the world that’s emerging, you need other voices, other people, and other ideas in order to experiment and decide on new forms of life. Transformation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Your desire to be part of a team right now is an intuitive response to our larger moment; your desire for community is a recognition that there is no survival without making space for each other. Without a community within which you can confirm your identity, it’s harder to be your own partner in solitude. You remain, instead, equivocal. You forget who you are writing to.

R, it may well be that you need a community of writers, but now, more than ever, you need community in the world, whatever that means for you. If your writing goals no longer serve you, thank them for the motivation they’ve given you these past twenty years and let them go: they had their purpose. Think deeply about the structures you’re holding onto: many of them won’t hold down in the tides to come. In the world that’s emerging, the measure of your writing is no longer appointed by publication and prestige. It won’t stand long in a world with fewer statues and more memorials. You can’t hide behind a blank screen or page when the window behind it shows a world that needs making, one that is only possible with your help; your spirit; your hope; your dreams. Writing is only one way this world can happen. It’s only by being part of that new world that you’ll know what’s worth making next.

Chadwick Boseman, through hiding cancer and illness, not only continued to work but to act in action films. To bring onto the screen a future in which Black lives not only matter, but created a world independent of the one we know today; a world where, I hope, no one in serious pain or illness would have to hide it again. He didn’t live to become a myth. He gave his community, and all of us, myths to live. And that is the mandate of the artist at all times, but especially now. Especially in a time when death stares down from the end of the road.

I believe, as artists, we’ve only heard one side of the story. We don’t just write to express ourselves. We write to be in conversation with each other. Through time. Over continents and languages. Beyond life and death. Literature lives because, lifetime after lifetime, world after world, writers have wanted to talk to each other. To remember. To go on. To share the hindsight of the future with the wisdom of the past. To fall in love again and again, differently. To speak defiantly in the midst of death. Speaking from one world, even between worlds. Making another way.

Notes

* Just an IOU on page number here—my library is still in storage. But here’s a convenient link to the book.

‘Do I Have to Be Out as a Writer?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I hope this letter finds you well. Congrats on the Substack Fellowship, and thank you for the generosity and thought you put into your letters. I’ve learned so much from them.

My letter is about boundaries, and about permission. Mainly, as they relate to writing about parts of myself that I don’t yet (and may not ever) feel comfortable discussing publicly. I’ve written a novel from the POV of a queer woman, which is how I identify. My friends and partner know this about me, but I’m not out to my family or on social media. The reasons I’m not out are complicated but have to do with not wanting to deal with backlash from my tight-knit immigrant community.

We’ve all seen the types of questions that women and nonbinary folks, queer folks, and people of color get asked in interviews. There’s that insidious assumption that we are writing autobiographically, and a kind of entitlement to ask us deeply personal questions. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I worry that I’ll be asked point-blank if I’m queer. Or, because I’m in a relationship with a man, that I’ll be read as straight, and will have to either let that assumption hang there or challenge it. I really don’t feel comfortable addressing my sexuality head-on in a public way, and I don’t know how I’d navigate a situation like that. And while I think it’s totally inappropriate to demand that someone disclose their sexuality, especially when doing so can be dangerous, I’m sympathetic to readers wanting to know. I would hate for anyone to feel queer-baited, or to think that I’m cosplaying or appropriating queerness because it’s trendy. The last thing I want is to cause harm. My day job is largely centered on helping queer folks, and I regularly promote the work of queer writers and support queer causes in person and on social media. I may not be out, but I’m part of a queer community.

Any advice you have for working through all this -- the desire to be myself on the page without outing myself to the world, to make queer folks feel seen without making them feel used -- would be so helpful. Thank you so much for reading.

Yours,

I don’t know how to write about queerness without addressing my own

Dear IDKHTWAQWAMO,

The moment I saw “tight-knit immigrant community,” I knew that you had written the letter I would have sent to this advice column if it had existed five or even ten years ago. Back then, I, like you, had been out to friends and activist circles but not to my family, and I had no plans of ever making that the case.

As you mention in your letter, you’re sympathetic to those who would want to know this information. The pressure to be out is very real, as is the need. Not knowing what immigrant community you come from, having queer role models living out happily and proudly is harder to find once you look away from the scores of white men and women who inundate mainstream queer media. I remember scouring the internet for examples of navigating that narrow margin between my atheist, but conservative, Chinese family and my implicitly white queer culture, whose pamphlets mainly spoke of navigating coming out against conservative Christian objections.

The answer to your initial question is easy: no, you don’t have to be out to write about queerness, nor do you ever have to. Your life is not a source of exotic intrigue and entertainment and no one is entitled to it, despite what centuries of colonialism and imperialism may have you believe. Interviews are like first dates: trust the other person as much as you like, but at the end of the day, you pick how much you want to show yourself. The same thing goes for readers. No one has a right to your personal information, and you’re the one who decides on what that is, full stop. There is a such thing as a glass closet , but whether you want to make one and stay in it is a question that only you can decide.

Now, I want to do some of the harder work with you in this letter. Because the thing is, though the answer about boundaries is clear, how you’re feeling about it isn’t. This question of being out is haunting you, down to even becoming an obsession of yours, and that’s because you have two strong wishes that are at odds with each other. You’re rightly suspicious of readers who assume autobiography, but then you also hope writing a queer protagonist would signal your queerness to them; you’re bracing your response for the interviewer who will ask you point blank about your sexuality, but you’re also thinking of the readers who need your representation; you’re conjuring others’ accusations of queer-baiting and being trendy, but you also want to write as who you are. In your letter, you’ve even pre-written your defense to the interviewer who does not yet exist: that their question is “completely inappropriate,” but you also take the side of these imaginary readers for whom your refusal to leave the closet may “cause harm.”

This future interviewer and queer readers are external opposition to the external reasons you’re staying in the closet at all: your need to avoid that backlash you mention from your small immigrant community. Neither of these scenarios, interestingly, reflect your own thoughts or desires. Whether it’s staying in or coming out, you’re looking to other people to make the frames of your choices, making them not really your choices at all. Perhaps, for you, it’s too painful or scary to even think about what that would mean, and that’s why you feel trapped, instead, between what everyone else wants, fated not to exist enough anywhere.

No, I’m not about to belittle the reasons why you want to stay in the closet and chastise you into coming out. I do want to talk about the possible consequences of what it means to straddle that line or try to live, without fail, on its razor-edge.

Like you, I couldn’t separate the story of my queerness from the story of my immigrant community. In isolation, my parents’ grief and disillusionment with the US, themselves, and each other was amplified and distorted privately, though they kept up the face of good immigrants in the face of racism publicly. Their fear of failure—and their fear of already reaching it—permeated my own sense of duty and my acceptance that I had to be perfect for them. It was not a question for me. They sacrificed their lives so mine could be better, so why wouldn’t I hide a small part of myself that I could, in theory, still live?

That was the logic. The other part was the fear—I was much more reluctant to admit that. The only time I felt the anger and violence my parents usually directed at themselves or each other was when I first tried to come out, and even then, those were moments they invaded my privacy—read my journals or forced me to show them private messages on social media. It was not just at home, either. Losing my parents meant losing my access to a whole community and identity. Being public as my self would alienate them from their own community. Coming out meant I’d never be able to go back to being Chinese. And for what?

I don’t know the story of your life now, IDKHTWAQWAMO, but I’ll guess that you had a newfound freedom when you moved out of your immigrant community. After all that meticulous scrubbing and hyper-vigilant secrecy, you were able to let your guard down and live out your values at work and with a chosen family of friends, maybe get your first short haircut, maybe go to pride events and protests and even be an out-and-proud role model to other queer people who now look up to you.

Perhaps, like me, you grew up learning that being your real self was dangerous in your own home, and if you didn’t scrub things away or lie effectively, you would be punished in ways that you couldn’t even imagine. Perhaps you’ve only known, for as long as you can remember, a life that revolves around a cycle of damage-control and secrecy and, after years or even decades of doing this, you’ve gotten used to being in control to the point where it now seems necessary.

The problem with control is that you have to stay one step ahead. No matter how much you think about them, you’ll never catch up with the number of scenarios that writing in public will bring to you. That’s part of the charm, really. But you won’t be able to enjoy any of that surprise because you’ll be thinking, for years, even decades, about the next lie or evasion you have to do to keep your identity secret.

This is coming up in your art for a reason. Because art is one of the few places where we really have choices: no one on earth can tell you where to place that stroke of paint, how to break a line, or what a character does next. When you tell a story in your writing, no one else but you knows the difference between the details that are fiction and fact. When you lie in your art, no one else but you scrubs away the parts of yourself that want to be visible. Your anger against this imaginary interviewer is correct but perhaps partially misplaced: for when you speak for your art and feel as though you still have to lie about it, you watch yourself inflict the violence you’ve been trying to control for so long. You may feel invisible, but your art is showing you how you’ve been taught to contribute to that fact.

The closer you get to that awareness, the closer you’ll find yourself in a messy pool of anger, shame, and guilt, almost perfectly mirrored in the situations you wrote about in your letter. You were taught to think around one community, so you’re in the habit of doing it with all others, but you’re anxious because for once, you’re not in control. Your closet’s walls are mirrors, each reflecting back to you an idea of what your queerness might look like to other groups of people. If you’re not one panel, then you have to be another, but the more you try to contort to one reflection, the more another one will distort.

If you close your eyes, you won’t be able to look at any of these reflections. A closet is also a safe and private space. It’s yours. You can choose, once and for all, to throw those mirrors out. If you close your eyes, that’s the beginning of coming out. It’s not an event like crossing a border. It’s not determined by what we see in others’ mirrors, but the portraits we draw from memory; the words we learn to write for ourselves, that show who we are. Those reflections of who we’re supposed to be are what we predict when we’re afraid to make mistakes. There is no failure for a life that has no model. To shape your life after what you want and not someone else’s model of perfection—that’s a lifetime of coming out.

I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that there will be work ahead now: you’ll start noticing, more and more, how you’re taking yourself out of your own choices. For those of us socialized as women, we were taught to never say “no.” We object through indecision—we choose indirectly. Our bodies speak before our minds. Your stress is telling you something: it’s time to reconsider the walls you had learned were immovable. Then, you have to choose, every day after that, what it means to come out for only you and no one else.

When you start choosing for yourself, you have to give up control of other people. When I chose, things got bad enough so that I had to cut off my parents. Although we speak occasionally today, there was a time, out of mutual trauma responses, that I feared for my life. My parents used other people I loved to get to me; those people also bore the brunt of my parents’ reactions. To protect my privacy, I stopped publishing under one name and chose this one. Despite those efforts, they did, eventually, find out about my transition. To respect my parents’ wishes, I will never see my extended family again—I didn’t even attend my grandfather’s funeral.

That pain will always be written as silences. But wherever there’s silence, there can always be noise somewhere else. In those same years, tentatively free, I edited a queer and trans Asian folio and published a book openly talking about my life. I fell in and out of love and I found queer Asian communities in New York. I cut my hair without repercussions. I went to therapy. Whatever Chinese-ness I thought I’d lose, I made a Chinese American life in my own image and the images of newfound friends and our art. And now I’m writing to you.

In your letter, you say that “[you] may not be out, but [you’re] part of the queer community.” I want to say it back to you, and more. Every day, someone will read your work or meet you and you’ll have to start the process all over again. Someone doesn’t know you’re queer. Someone doesn’t know where you work or who you’ve loved. But the number of people who don’t know don’t constitute its truth. You do.

Queerness is not a set of standards or rules: it’s us. We make it, we live it, we dream it. You exist to me and all the people who you talk to and touch directly about and with because you’re queer. You exist when you live your life and your art informed by your queerness. You exist when you know who you are. Some of us—many of us—have had to protect that light for as long as we needed to to survive. Wherever you are, you’re already one of us. Whenever you’re ready, we’ve been waiting to hear from you. We’re ready to love who you are.

‘How Do I Get Through My MFA Program?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I’m in an MFA program that is deeply unsupportive and tokenizing of marginalized folks and our work. A mentor told me she finished her Masters program out of spite, and I’m feeling that way too. She said nobody gets out unscathed. Do you have advice for how to get through programs like this while focusing of mental wellness and avoiding burn out? My entire time in academia has been exhausting, as I’m a queer non-binary disabled person of color and white supremacy is everywhere. Thankful for your time.

Best,

Getting My MFA in Navigated Bull Shit
Western Mass

Dear GMMFAIFINBS,

Thank you for writing. I’ve been waiting to answer your letter because I wanted to give you a comprehensive history of the MFA in the US. I didn’t want my answer to fail you, as it sounds like your program is doing. However, your letter has been coming up for me these past few days, as the school year is just around the corner and I’ve been steadily working on the question of what it means to design an inclusive (and evolving) creative writing class this fall. I realized my answer shouldn’t wait. I realized that I wouldn’t fail you by just writing to you what I’ve learned.

While you don’t say specifically what’s unsupportive or tokenizing of your program, let me venture to guess: you can’t bring in anything without someone commenting on your identities or ignoring how they appear in your work; you’re sometimes asked specifically to include more hints of your “culture” in your work; your peers mispronounce your name; your peers assume that you got into the program because of your identities, not because you are a good writer; your work is often misinterpreted along lines of identity; you get line edits or even major revisions suggested for your writing because no one, perhaps not even the instructor, knows what traditions your writing is following.

Or perhaps your peers and instructors assume you write differently because you’re undereducated or overly political and not because you have learned and chosen not to follow the canonical way. Your peers bring in harmful, unexamined work and your instructors say nothing or, even worse, assure you of their allyship privately but won’t use their power to address these issues head-on in the classroom. Sometimes these are instructors you looked up to or people you thought would have been most likely to help. You’ve watched your program coordinators ignore, condone, or sweep under the rug something hurtful or harmful that has happened to someone else or even you; someone will comment every so often about how “angry” or “political” you are all the time, or you silently keep in your feelings or true critiques because you don’t trust this community to educate itself or respond to your needs.

In these guesses, of course, I’m only referring to the classroom itself. I haven’t mentioned the various ways that MFA institutions, aside from a few private programs that provide full rides or more affordable, but less prestigious state programs, are simply unaffordable and unreachable to those without deep pockets or loans. I haven’t mentioned the myth of meritocracy or individuality baked into the philosophies of a lot of these programs; nor do I mention the classed knowledge and access these programs tend to be selling as well. I haven’t mentioned the favoritism, nepotism, and competition that these programs incubate in a literary industry that relies on perceived talent based on clever marketing, networking, and prestige.

Bear with me, as I promise I will answer your question by the end of this letter. Beyond what I’ve just laid out for you, those who know me know that I’m skeptical of the writing workshop model. My hope, for a start, is that more emerging writers will know from the jump that CIA money originally funded prestigious programs and magazines like Iowa Writers Workshop and The Paris Review , and let that guide their choices on how to continue as writers.

Not knowing your program, I can at least recount some of the messages I’ve heard through the years: it’s all about “show, don’t tell,” “write what you know,” “you can talk about politics, but only politely,” and “how much of the Canon™ can you allude to, but slant, in one piece?” The aesthetics of prestige are a navel-gazing, self-reproducing reference to itself. The workshop model, predicated on the Famous Writer at its center, relies on other pervasive myths: that education is professionalization, famous writers must be talented writers, and talented writers must also be good readers, editors, and teachers. In most of the writing workshops I’ve ever attended, if we were lucky, the instructor would set one ground rule, to “use ‘the speaker’ to refer to the narrator, rather than ‘you,’” and we’d be off to the races.

Your program is failing you because there’s a misconception that the writer’s business is merely writing. That, and the value of a work depends on how much emotional release—catharsis—it can extract from the reader or how “relatable” it is. If you don’t take these assumptions as immovable, it can be clearer to see how the mythologies around the workshop disadvantage writers like us.

There’s a reason the introductory class I’m teaching this fall is called “Reading and Writing.” Reading is half the writer’s work. Very few writers are taught how to read for critique, for we assume that just because we can read something means we read it well enough to deserve to critique it . You’ve probably heard others in the writing community talk about so-and-so being a good reader for their work—it’s perhaps one of the highest compliments I ever give and receive from writer to writer.

Reading is listening. Being a good reader for someone else’s work is short-hand for a reader who has read widely and deeply enough not only to recognize techniques or forms but also the theories, politics, and histories behind them. Being a good reader means being someone who uses these insights to understand and, as an editor, provide feedback that would further and improve the author’s original goals. Being a good reader doesn’t always involve agreement, but does always involve understanding. Reading well takes skill, time, and upkeep. Reading well is, on its own, a life’s work. It is ongoing. It is critical. It is absolutely necessary if you want to be a good writer.

Thus, I must ask, if what you wrote is true, why are you still in this program? If it’s money you’re worried about, whatever money you’ve already sunk into this program, you can save yourself whatever’s left. You might believe that you need this program in order to be a writer, that you need this program to prove to your family that you’re a writer; that you need this program to prove it to the world; that you need this program to prove it to yourself. But none of it’s true. This program is exhausting you. This program is teaching you, emotionally, that the more you write, the more you’ll be subjected to unnecessary racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. And unless its leaders have given you the accountability to believe it, this program is not going to be different or easier to get through the more time you spend in it.

When I hear that you’re exhausted, I don’t know, but I know, that you’re exhausted by these small reminders of how your needs are forgotten, your thoughts and ideas are disrespected, and your mentors, too, are too tired to help you. I don’t know, but I know, that you’re exhausted by the belief that the best you deserve is to barely survive. And I’m angry about all of that. “Anger is loaded with information and energy.”* Anger marks the edge of our boundaries; illuminates the path to our desires. Are you being honest with yourself about yours?

You are exhausted because you are, as Hannah Arendt once wrote about statelessness, deprived of a context in which your opinions are heard and your actions effective. This exhaustion is resign. This exhaustion is powerlessness. In this exhaustion, in its darkest places, you may lose yourself. For burnout, more specifically, is you surviving in a context in which you effectively disappear—you disconnect from the world, feel hopeless, and stop meaningfully engaging.

In my last few months of working in tech, this hopelessness rose to the surface in harmful negativity. My energy was angry, bitter, and trapped toward myself and others. I sighed constantly, trying to expel the clenched stress in my chest. The care and patience with which I usually am well-resourced had run out. Over years of minuscule but persistent compromises, I was on my way to becoming unrecognizable to myself.

Although this was not with a writing program, I hope you won’t wait to leave like I did. By silencing your anger, by silencing your needs, you’ll finish your program not only tired but without much change made within it, if at all. You, however, will be. You’ll be used to giving up your demands before you even know what they are. You’ll be used to silence and may even prefer it, but by silencing not only your needs, but also your wants , you’ll not only have spent your time in a place that didn’t cherish you fully, but you’ll have practiced, too well, living in a way that does not.

Why would you pay, if you’re not on scholarship, to be disrespected and devalued? Why would you allow your suffering to have a price, if you do have a full ride? When we grow up in contexts with little agency or power, we start believing that everything is about surviving from point A to point B. We start every sentence with “If I can get through until... , ” with the signpost getting moved when we reach it. We start staying because we are grateful for pittances. We stop imagining the lives that we truly wish to live; we allow ourselves to be distracted by the ones we’re given.

There are ways for you to work through it if this program is not greatly affecting your mental health—something you should confirm and reflect on with a therapist you trust. Examine, for example, whether you need help accepting critique or if the critique is without specificity and judgmental (e.g. “Can you help me understand this line?” vs. “This line is incomprehensible”). The former is workable—the latter is a dud to be forgotten, at best. Sometimes, a whole workshop can turn out this way, with most, if not every comment from peers and the instructor completely missing the point. Unless you’re having trouble with taking in feedback, in those scenarios, you will have to ask yourself how much of your time you’re willing to waste.

If this program is not greatly affecting your mental health, you must be frank and pragmatic with yourself about what you want and how easy it will be to get it. Did you join this program to get a degree? If so, you could bring in work that does not feel vulnerable while using the funding, resources, and studio time of the institution to develop your actual work. Did you join this program to improve your writing? Stay cautious and intentional. Seek out the real teachers, not the celebrities. Offer your real work only when your workshops have proven they are good readers to you first.

I recommend that you look for a community of like-minded writers, even if that community is far away—collectives, organizations, and retreats geared toward identity have been nourishing and liberating spaces for me to think and feel freely as myself. If you’re lucky, you can find and treasure at least one friend nearby who treats you as you deserve and who can do the same for your work. If you’re even luckier, you’ll find a small group of people like this. These communities, even beyond the writing community, will not buffer you from the difficulties of living in our time, but will at least give you reason to moor in the present and believe in the future.

GMMFAIFINBS, I don’t know your reasons for wanting to stay in this program, and I have answered you accordingly. But know that it’s a context that you can extract yourself from, should you choose to do so. As you note in your letter, white supremacy is everywhere, and the skeletons of that hegemony are going to haunt us for centuries to come, even if revolutions come tomorrow. You must protect yourself and your work at all costs, then help the next who need it. However or whenever you get out of there, you deserve so much more. You deserve better readers. You deserve better instruction. You deserve a better world. The hard part is acting on behalf of yourself. The hard part is believing in that world. The hard part is leaving, as yourself, to write it.

Notes

* Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981).

‘Can My Novel Include a Country’s Stereotype Responsibly?’

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I hope you’re staying safe and sane out there! And congratulations on the Substack fellowship!

I have a question concerning writing about a specific place, particularly when there are stereotypes associated with that place and its people. I’m Brazilian and for a few months now I've been outlining, researching and writing the occasional scene for what I hope will be an English-language, contemporary novel set in Brasília, Brazil’s capital.

Like it has for much of the global south, the global north has a few stereotypes about Brazil and Brazilians that are either incredibly damaging -- corrupt, lazy, loud, over-sexed -- or paint a very limited vision of the country -- everything is beaches and rainforests or extreme poverty and drug trafficking. I’ve lived in the US for most of my 20s, and I’ve always pushed back when these stereotypes pop up.

Now, here’s my conundrum. Corruption is a plot point of the work in progress. It centers on a family entangled in politics that is corrupt in a series of small ways. In sketching out scenes where corruption is discussed, I’m finding it hard writing them without worrying that I’m feeding into stereotypes about Brazil. At the same time, I don’t want to not describe corruption because it is an insidious issue. The TLDR of this would be something like: how do you write about a country’s problems when these problems are also a huge stereotype about that country?

I should add that part of my concern is that, due to my upbringing, I may be writing about Brazil from a gringo perspective. Like I mentioned, I have lived in the US for the last few years, but in addition to that, I spent my early childhood in a different English-speaking country and attended an international school in Brazil after we moved back. I bristle when others suggest I’m not really Brazilian, but I also feel like I’ve failed the litmus test for being able to write about Brazil and its problems as a Brazilian.

Thank you so much for creating The Reading and for the care you put into every response. As you can probably guess, your letter to IDK from New Jersey about identity was especially moving and it made me take my own conundrum more seriously.

Thank you so much and good luck on your move!

FF
Boston (but back to Brazil in ~ 10 days!)

Dear FF,

Thank you for the good wishes. I’m heartened that IDK’s letter and its response resonated with you. My Aries sun says you two should start a writing group (and my Capricorn moon says to keep it going if you do).

So, before I say anything else, your instincts to be protective of Brazil are totally right. I won’t repeat the statistics of the publishing workforce or even the abysmal advance differences we saw this summer with #PublishingPaidMe , but if you plan on keeping one foot in with the Publishing Industry™, a lot of your first readers—agents, editors, and reviewers—will be white.

Although I can’t relate to your exact position, I also know a little bit of what it feels like to be born into a family that’s always telling you that home is in one place while you’re living in another. There’s a nostalgia created for a place you only remember a bit of, a yearning for the past that naturally attracts us to it in our adult lives.

I know what it feels like to be told that that home is not actually yours when you get there. I remember being clueless about how “American” my clothes were or feeling a heightened awkwardness in my elementary Sichuanese when ordering at a bakery in China. I remember arguing with my parents and being called “ABC” (American-Born Chinese) to emphasize how I’d been brainwashed by the West, even though I wasn’t born in the US.

Your instincts to protect Brazil from yourself are also right, but more complicated. Your time living in the US and the international schools you went to probably do skew your perspective, perhaps in the same way that only being able to read about China in English skews mine. Yet, it’s no fault of your own that going from the third to the second to the first world (to purposefully name that antiquated progression) are all about assimilation, with assimilation being a kind of reeducation, and reeducation being a slow and subtle way to drive a culture to extinction: what is the point of remembering if there’s nothing to remember?

When someone invested in nations, borders, or in-groups looks upon you and sees a nobody to fill with their history, their ideas, and their religion, they don’t know or care that you’ve come from somewhere. You’re the virgin forest or the noble savage; the wide-eyed adulator; the blank canvas upon which their vision will be realized; the “corrupt, lazy, loud, over-sexed” south to their disciplining north, though it has nothing to do with geography.

We, marginalized writers, escaped this dynamic by claiming, loudly and clearly, the wisdoms and histories of our ancestors. To speak out in defiance that we, in fact, do have a home. But that’s created another conundrum: we’re asked to hold twice the knowledge, do twice the work, and live twice—once for this homeland and once for our educators; once in the past and once in the future.

As you know, at the end of my letter to IDK, I asked what if “you were no longer a bridge, but an origin point?” In a story that’s influenced my own thinking about my body and borders, Gloria Anzaldúa offers a river with two opposing sides. She writes in a preceding paragraph,

El choque de un alma atrapado entre el mundo del espíritu y el mundo de fa técnica a veces la deja entullada. Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque , a cultural collision [1].

When I said “someone invested in nations” above, you probably imagined that white audience again. But I’m also talking about when my parents called me an ABC, when you didn’t pass the Brazilian “litmus test,” or when people are called “banana” or “Oreo” ( x on the outside, white on the inside). In these other dualities, biology, race, property ownership, or place of birth as the marker of x -ness may have nothing to do with it. You’re right or you’re wrong. You’re in or you’re out.

These other groups don’t use the “legal” ways the world has determined borders, for they themselves may also be frequent border-crossers, but they create others, judging authenticity—that vague, changeable feeling in groups—as a flag for another nation.

Anzaldúa’s river naturally has two sides. And we, naturally, may believe that we can only stand on one. But just as Anzaldúa says that “[all] reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against” [2], unless we do the work to question the reactionary impulses within us, we will always center the oppressions within us.

Nation-building is how we’ve found each other. But to remake nations is not enough. I’ve been on the outskirts for a while, being thrice-removed from my identities. Once because I lived in the US in a Chinese home, twice because I am queer and trans in the gender-conforming world, and a third time because I am Asian in the United States. Wherever I turned, there was a reason I wasn’t welcome.

You feel bound up by your writing right now because you’re trying to belong, at once, to two different agendas. It is attractive, even, to have one around, giving you bullet points along which you can emerge correctly, but two is too much for reliability. Going up with one means being down on the other, you feel how dissatisfying this is, but you find it even more terrifying to be responsible for your own work.

It is easier, or perhaps habit, to pay attention to the needs of others over your own, perhaps even more when those others are a country. I’m going to tell you now that whatever you’re trying to do for Brazil, you will only be able to achieve for yourself. You asked about writing your story in the least harmful way, but what you’re really asking for is permission to be yourself at your messiest and incorrect. You’re asking for permission for Brazil to be a place not only of those stereotypes and their neat oppositions but also a place in which you see clearly and dream loudly. Where the people you love may not only exist but are also recognized in their lifelong complexities. It is terrifying to give yourself permission to hope. It is even more terrifying, and daring, to write it as your own.

Don Mee Choi, on borders and translation, says this:

I am not content to just go from Korean to English. I am not content to uphold the notion of national literature—the notion that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders. What this implies is that the so-called national literature simply needs to cross linguistic and national borders, as if such borders are entirely ahistorical and apolitical. Whenever poet Kim Hyesoon is asked whether her poetry represents her country—a question that is rarely asked of a poet whose work is perceived to be rooted in the Western canon—she never fails the answer that her poetry comes from the Republic of Kim Hyesoon. [3]

Last March, I arrived at the door of Performance Space in New York City to attend a marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee . Writers Ken Chen and Ava Chin were also there, puzzling over a page of Chinese characters that Ava had been asked to read. They both looked to me and asked, “Can you read this?” I can, over the years of soap operas and fragments of Saturday Chinese school, read a little, so I helped as best as I could, and we figured it out. Later, we found the pronunciations of the characters somewhere else in the book. It turned out to be in Cantonese, which Ava knew the entire time!

When you dare to write about corruption in Brazil, you imagine a Brazil that doesn’t live in fear of being judged for its complexity. Racism flattens and nations deport; lines are constantly being drawn in the sand of what you and I are not. And instead of proof of citizenship, who would we be if we were nations unto ourselves?

When we belong in a place that doesn’t yet exist, we belong in ourselves, our lived wisdoms and dreams. When we publish, what we write no longer remains ours alone, nor should it be. Whatever fragments we hold are whole in themselves. Writes yours to me. When you write to yourself, the picture you make is neither of the past nor the planned, but for a present where you are truly contemporary.

'I Wrote My First Draft. Where’s the Second?'

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I hope this letter finds you well. Yesterday marked the one year birth anniversary of my murder mystery (and first novel!). Now rationally, I know that writing is allowed to take years and years, but I can’t help being a little (okay, a lot) disappointed that I haven’t finished my second draft yet. Sure, I tell myself to celebrate the 60,000 word first draft, and all the tens of thousands of words of planning and pre-writing, but I can’t shake the feeling that this novel is not ‘valid’ until it’s finished.

A steady diet of craft books and author talks has prepared me for ‘shitty first drafts’ and being a lonely, reader-less writer for the first few years (decades?), and the consequent importance of ‘writing for yourself’. I understand that I’m not writing at a professional level (yet!), so I just have to keep writing what I enjoy until I’m good. The problem is that I’m always waiting for future me, who has transcended the imperfections that present me has to suffer through. Even as I write this, I’m chiding myself for focusing on the (mythical) destination instead of relishing the journey, but knowing something objectively is very different from accepting it.

[I hope I’m not rambling—I have a terrible tooth ache that is distracting me.]

Occasionally, I make digital art, and naturally, this art is promptly posted on my instagram. For many months I’ve noticed that I attach a lot of value to this act of sharing (to the maybe twenty people who follow me). Revealing the art to the world becomes the final step of creation, to the point where I don’t get closure from art that I just make for myself. You could say this is me wanting to connect with other people, but more honestly, this reflects my intense need for validation.

I think I approach my writing in the same way. A long thoughtful email to a friend is not valid unless I archive it properly (Even this letter, I am putting it in my journal, so it counts when I add up the total word count at the end of the month). A drabble is not valid unless I send it to my sister. This story idea will be valid when I eventually finish it and get it published. This political commentary is not valid because I’m just a student who doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. My book review is not valid unless it’s published by a gate-keeping literary website—what’s the use of a 500 word reading response I write for myself? But even in these thoughts I am not fully sold—there’s a part of me that stubbornly holds on to the conviction that my writing is valid, because I wrote it, because I wanted to write it.

All of this is compounded by my urgent desire to get something, anything published this summer. I feel that this is an opportunity to get some clips, so I’m overloading my to-do list with writing projects, and never finishing anything. I feel like I’m supposed to be doing something useful with my time—after all, I’m living for free with my parents, and I have no real obligations for the next two months. I understand that this is an instrumental approach to writing, but really, I have been writing for so long but I never submit any work. Now I tell myself, I’ll never have so much time, or so few cares. If I can’t write in these most ideal circumstances, how will I scrape together the time to write in the future?

Thank you for this newsletter. It is welcome relief to an ache I didn’t know I had.

Best,
Seeking Validation
India

Dear SV,

First of all, congratulations on writing your first novel draft. You and I have a lot in common. I can tell because over the years, I too have had a “steady diet of craft books and author talks,” turning to tips, tricks, and technical know-how occasionally seasoned with life advice. I can tell because, like me, you’ve already anticipated things that I could say: the first draft is always shitty, sometimes the writing takes years, enjoy the journey, you want to be a future self, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, you have a need for validation, etc.

You are also aware of your self-criticism: how you chide yourself for not enjoying the journey or that your feelings about speedy publication and productivity are “instrumental.” And there’s a part of you that’s fighting for you to believe, already, what I’ve already said —your writing is valid because you wrote it. You know and I know—we’ve done the reading. Comprehensively. So I won’t waste your time on what you know.

You dedicate the second half of your letter talking about your need for validation, diagnosing it where it shows up in your writing. Your microscope grows larger to other areas of your life, expanding to analyze your digital art, your attachments to Instagram, and even how you don’t feel like something is real unless it has been categorized (archiving) or sent to someone else (your sister), the word count neatly accounted for. Not one to take up so much space about yourself to a stranger, you also worry about my impression of you, interrupting yourself in the middle to excuse your letter’s faults. This is, you say, from a toothache.

I, too, have some experience with problem-solving my feelings. Once, while I was talking about a relationship issue, a therapist once told me that I must be an excellent software engineer (my profession at the time). Why , I asked, confused. All alone as a child, she explained, you learned to survive by using your intellect. You analyzed and categorized your world around you to prevent danger before it happened.

Oh , I realized. I was hyperconscious of others’ responses to me because their judgments had consequences for not only my safety but also the love I received. The daily moods of my caretakers and community resulted in whether I was given, or starved, of love. So I performed as a chance to redeem myself. The harder I worked, the more data I analyzed, the better and more comprehensive my performances became. My sense of self became an ever-improving brand management, a ploy to try and control the relationships I needed to be different.

SV, you’ve determined that you have a need for validation. And you use that diagnosis to talk yourself down and to remain, forever, in need of more data. But knowledge and analysis are only feeding a need to control your writing. They’re merely processes and roles you reach for when you try to transform who you are. Wanting to escape your current outcomes, wanting to escape your current self, knowledge is your secret door, your chance to get out of there. But when you leave in the night, there’s a part of yourself that’s constantly getting left behind. You mistake your grief for incompletion. You replace this hole with attention from someone else. And with each new act to reach completion, you practice this art of abandoning yourself again.

In these late days of summer, my partner and I will sometimes go down to a creek where three streams meet at the ends of their separate waterfalls. The waterfalls come to mind while we make dinner, listening to Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States , when Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us how colonizers thought Indigenous peoples had the “disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worst than useless reasons” and that “open, park-like woods,” could not have been the result of Indigenous cultivation.

She goes on to say:

In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environment (53).

Colonial myths like this can and have foreclosed not only lives but whole worlds from being realized. What would have happened, I wonder, if the Europeans had chosen to respect the intricacies of Indigenous wisdom and relationships these peoples had with each other and the land? What could they have learned if they had set aside the knowledge they had—conquest and enslavement—and dreamed instead of learning how to survive together with who and what was unrecognizable to them?

You wrote your first draft through the knowledge you gained. Now, you’re at an impasse. The land seems empty, but it’s only unrecognizable. No one can tell you how to face your own work. It is all too general, too askew from your situation. The problems, perhaps, are specific to your plot, nestled in your sentences, ingrained in your characters’ developments. And your draft, for which you built the mountain, dug the streams, and poured the waterfalls—now rushes water at your feet, seeming sloppy, wild, an uncontainable mess.

Perhaps, unconsciously, you never published these riches because they were made with all of you. Not the likable you, the smart you, or the hard-working you. The you who needs protection and attention rather than another thing to do. For there is no such thing as a place unoccupied or imperfect. If you want your art to come from a sense of possibility and not a sense of scarcity, you must relate to your art as a caretaker, not an overseer. Revisions are adjustments for a book to become more like itself. Like your whole self, a book appears as it’s supposed to exist. You might kill your darlings only to discover that you’ve driven the heart of your work to extinction. Instead of trying to move forward, you might have to go back. You might need to begin draft seven with a version of draft two. Your imagination does not belong to your will. Let it move as it truly wishes.

My first unpublished manuscript, no matter how many times I reordered it, never set quite right to me. And I couldn’t describe what it lacked then even if I had tried. I feel thankful to this manuscript even though it was never published. It was certainly good enough to be published. If I had used the right connections or had had a big enough audience, it would have been. I’m thankful it wasn’t.

As Dunbar-Ortiz writes in her book, the drive for capitalist-based colonization was “a belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness” (52). You are looking for validation that will never satisfy you. You are searching for gold that will never be useful to you. Anonymity is not a weakness—it is a gift to sit undisturbed with your wholeness. What would you do if there was no audience to sell to? What would you write if it was just what you needed?

When I held that manuscript up to the light, I saw its structure and what I wasn’t saying. I had to give all I knew to see what I didn’t. What was hidden or buried—beautiful but impenetrable images, unfinished allusions in my poems—I excavated. Made plain. Rather than try to contain the water, I offered each poem as a glass to drink—enough for what we need to live, not to hoard. Not needing to capture its beauty, to contradict it, or to own it. To ask only that water nourish us. To remember what it’s really for.

'Money Seems More Real Than My Art.'

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’m constantly juggling multiple writing projects. The newest project always carries the most appeal, because its flaws aren’t yet apparent. The project closest to being finished is always the hardest to get into. And the process of trying to get a finished work out into the world where something like a public might see it feels like trying to push a wall over with my face. I hate it. I believe that writing is freedom and play ... but I also believe writing is work and I should get paid for this work.

I’m not sure where the strength to engage with this other side of the business of art is supposed to come from. I know that starting a lot of projects that I never finish feels bad too. I feel like I’m supposed to “believe in myself” or something, and I don’t know how that’s supposed to work. Perhaps relevant: I have an expensive MFA degree which I am still paying off. Money seems so much more real than my artistic practice.

Detroit, MI

Dear ____,

I had many responses come up when I was reading your letter, all of which seemed to be speaking to topics far-flung from each other. I even thought you had two letters at first—one about finishing your work and another about surviving on your art in capitalism—but what’s funny about style is that it can reveal what we’re not willing or able to say about what we’re saying.

Does it feel as though you’re jumping a chasm in order to work through your two dilemmas? Incidentally, your letter is formed in two paragraphs. Does one idea get interrupted by another? Coincidentally, you interrupt “writing is freedom and play” with “writing is work” (they are connected, of course, with the further redaction of the ellipsis). No matter how much you go between the assertions of art as play and art as work, do you always pick one belief over the other? Your two paragraphs each end with “I should get paid for this work” and “money seems so much more real than my artistic practice.”

While you intellectually may acknowledge and even believe that “writing is freedom and play,” your letter betrays that you’re operating right now with the belief that art is work. You give this away with the words you use. Your writing is made of “projects.” An audience is how you’ll “get paid.” It’s not art but “the business of art.” All this is compounded by that expensive MFA degree you mention, which you likely justified because MFAs seem like the only respectable compromise between capital and art or, exactly the compromise you’re trying to make inside yourself.

The degree, with its looming debt, is also a constant reminder not only of your material conditions but also your failure to make that investment worthwhile so far. Inside, though you don’t mention it in your letter, you maybe thought you’d land a book deal out of the gate or make the connections that would help you transition fully into the literary life (if there is one such life)—just that something would transform you in that program that would fill the lack you needed to call yourself a real writer. Remember, it wasn’t just an MFA but an expensive MFA. You gave yourself what you believed was the best. It’s not that you don’t know how to “believe in [yourself]”—you already did, and right now, you’re afraid you’re failing.

I don’t know your class background or your experiences with money as you were growing up. But I can tell you that everyone’s relationship with money is shaped by their childhood class environment, even if they’ve moved around in the system. If you’re poor, you likely grew up talking about money all the time—the lack of it, the need of it, the want of it—and if you were upper-middle class, you perhaps were taught that there’s always more money to be had or made, even if you didn’t know where it was going to come from. Money was never a worry and your family probably didn’t talk much about it. So did you grow up wondering where your next meal was going to be? Or did you have family members with graduate degrees? Or did you grow up speaking the same dialect of English as the people who were usually in authority? [1]

Your beliefs about class mobility may tell you that you need to work hard and gain expertise in the right industry ladder, and the MFA was the first rung. Your class beliefs may tell you that in order to be a writer, you had to do it the right way, the way that has you learning the right craft, meeting the right editors, and learning from the right experts. Your class beliefs tell you that where you come from, none of what you knew was right, which is why it was worth it to pay so much. And right now, your class beliefs may be taunting you, asking why, when you did everything right, you still can’t even finish one project?

We believe in the myth of MFAs because they’re from institutions that confer degrees, and degrees are objective signifiers of worth, of facts that racists, xenophobes, and transphobes can’t deny. At the emotional center of the American dream is not only a myth about meritocracy, but also the belief that we can buy the worthiness to be loved for who we truly are.

In the words of feminist finance educator Hadassah Damien, “money is a proxy” [2]. Money becomes power. Money becomes love. Money becomes food, shelter, and stability. While I can’t tell you exactly why money seems more real than your artistic practice right now, I can speculate on some possibilities.

The first is that you actually, really, do need money right now. You can’t finish what you write because you don’t have the energy to do that right now. You need to buy groceries in the middle of a pandemic. You have a loved one who you are sending money to or you’ve been disowned and you are scraping by with rent. You have no savings or emergency fund and no one in your life who you can call to deposit $500 into your bank account.

You can’t finish writing because you, ____, need to focus on surviving. Anyone who tells you that the conditions to make art have nothing to do with money (and that anyone who does do it for money is a sellout) is touting the fantasy of the starving artist and, honestly, probably does have someone who they can call for an emergency bailout. That fantasy is rigged. One only needs to remember that we mostly hear from the ones who didn’t starve.

Surviving is creative, but there is no project or product. It is not glamorous. It calls for finding a means of supporting yourself that isn’t writing or even creative. It calls for doing the hard work of believing in mutual aid, of asking for help from people who care for you and from people who care for you without your knowledge right now. It calls for your friends and your ancestors. It calls for your protection, not your sacrifice. I’ve said before in this newsletter that our art is the fragments of what we’ve lived . But our art is also “what we have lost and what we dream for.” [3] You, alive, are necessary for those dreams. Someone needs them to exist one day. When you survive, you don’t give yourself away to get what you need. Survival is the art of resisting destruction.

Your relative resource insecurity will intensify the other (not mutually exclusive) possibility that you read your work as a product and not as something valuable to yourself. Your art is a proxy to money which is a proxy to something else. I’m going to tell you that unless it’s those basic resources I just mentioned, money will not get you that something else, and your art is suffering in the process.

Perhaps you dread revising your work for the public because you’ve imagined, already, the critic who will judge you through your writing and, by never finishing, they’ll never have a chance to say you’re the failure you may believe yourself to be. Yet, in protecting yourself by self-sabotaging, you’re destroying, too, the possibility of getting the freedom and play that you truly want.

The closest you get in your letter to joy in your own work is when you talk about starting a new project. It’s only then that you can write with a sense of possibility away from an internal critic who’s telling you to hurry up and get the show on the road. Classism lives rent-free in our habits and lives. This critic doesn’t care about your happiness. It doesn’t care about your art. It wants you to believe you have to pay an admission fee to make the content appropriate for its awards and audiences, that art lives within the margins of what an MFA is supposed to provide. Art doesn’t. Art won’t. You don’t.

There is a longing, an obsession, that I’m always consumed by when I’m finishing a manuscript. The work never starts as a book. It starts as a beginning. And as writers, when we work, we are always beginning whether it’s the middle or the end. Where we are in the work doesn’t matter. Books are made with beginnings.

Take your projects and put them away for a little while. Pull down the artificial structures—the outlines with their goals and lists—and write without looking to a map. You may find that you don’t know where you’re going. You may find a turn you’d like to make, or a scene you’d like to take in. Allow your journey to be long. You may find pleasure in how the path goes on and on.

Send a letter

Notes

[1] “ What is Classism ”

[2] From “ Trauma-Informed Money Practice .” I’m personally indebted to Damien for helping me further my practical understanding of money and class.

[3] “It would speak about being human. About how we are the places we have been, the people we have slept with. How we are what we have lost and what we dream for.” – Bill T. Jones, Last Night on Earth (1995)

'I Can't Write Through Chaos!'

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

I hope this letter finds you well.

I write to you from this overwhelmed world. Everything is happening at the same time, and everything requires immediate attention. There is work to be done on the day to day, and work to be done with the larger community. This might be the fault of an emerging writer, but writing has become a hectic practice for me lately.

I try to write about all my feelings at once. In doing so I feel immobilized by its grand size and expanse, and in the end become detached, as an easier way out. I know as a writer, it is our job to write during struggles, to write through uncontrollable forces and fear. But I’m lost at how to organize this compound of daily occurrences and responses. Should I separate them strand by strand, focus on one feeling at a time, or wait for the feelings to settle, to sort themselves out?

Maybe it’s a task writers always have to work on, but I would really like to learn how another writer works with chaos and obligations, how to be sincere with one’s feelings yet have some focus.

Thank you for The Year of Blue Water. And thank you for your work and time.

All the best,

wz

Dear WZ,

Thank you for writing to me about your dilemma, which is felt not only during pandemics but during the usual course of working under exploitative conditions in “normal” times. Trust me when I say that your struggle comes not from being an emerging writer, but that you’ve discovered, in practice, the question of where writing fits—if ever—in daily life. You describe yours as being filled with everyday work and the public work, I assume, that is tied to aiding and resisting the political transformations of our time.

There are two ways I could answer your letter. There’s your outward question, asking practically about how to balance writing with life, but there’s also a second and deeper one, and I think that’s where I need to go first before I talk concretely about your original query.

The first word that jumped out to me when I read your letter is “overwhelmed.” Although you’re talking about the world when “everything is happening at the same time” and “everything requires immediate attention,” it’s also you who is “[trying] to write about all [your] feelings at once.” It’s only when you “detach” that you don’t feel this way, but you judge yourself immediately when you do that, calling it “an easier way out.” You’re also saying, on top of the everyday work and the public work, that you feel it is “our job” as writers “to write during struggles, to write through uncontrollable forces and fear."

I was once having a particularly bad time when my parents were trying to force me to live my life as a straight person. I was told I had no choice in the matter because I was from my family and therefore smart and, as a smart girl, I would identify how crooked I had become and course-correct accordingly. It was, implicitly, an ultimatum, though I was never actually given the other choice. If I made another choice, I was allowing my parents to judge me as not smart and, even worse, as a degenerate who wouldn’t be recognized as part of the family at all. I was kept up at night with convoluted problem-solving in trying to balance both lives, going as far as to figuring out which cis male friends of mine would agree to a sham wedding, then how I would keep up the ruse...

Eventually, one night, this problem-solving spiraled into a panic attack. And it was during that panic attack that I realized my stress would not disappear even if I balanced these two lives perfectly. I would barely manage the emotional strain and mental gymnastics it would take to lie at the scale required and I would never make art again.

You know how the story ends. Art was, at that time, the only place I harbored a sense of self. It was the only place I truly felt free to do whatever I wanted, where no one else was watching or judging me; where passing thoughts could play out more definitively; where life, examined and reimagined, only had to make meaning for me . I don’t exaggerate when I say that to never be able to enter that place again—it was tantamount to a living death.

You will not, and cannot, write your way through disaster, because writing is not an occupation, it is an assertion of humanity. Writing is the demand and practice of freeing oneself. Not freedom to harm others or freedom to disappear from history, but freedom in your life to think and feel for yourself. No matter what the struggles for human dignity and freedom are in our time, art is the freedom we can access today. It is not a duty but a liberation.

When you say that overcoming chaos is a “task” or writers have a “job” to write through our collective struggles, you’re treating writing as a duty. In order to be a real writer, you might say to yourself, you must fulfill x requirements, and any misstep will disqualify you. Perhaps you’re used to gritting your teeth through the grueling work to get that A+, that acknowledgement, or that love. Perhaps you’re used to who you are being set as a series of tasks. You’re so used to it that you now judge yourself based on the amount of work you can sustain in the hopes of receiving others’ approval. You’ve disciplined yourself to the point that when you’re overloaded, instead of stopping, you’ll try to “organize” the work into submission, and when you take a break from nonstop work, you see that as a character flaw rather than a response to your own needs.

You’re becoming aware of not only your immediate circle but also the whole world of people who need and deserve help, but you’re approaching this problem with the same survival skills. You can’t feel complete without that list of tasks being complete, but now you’ve met a series of tasks that you’ll never be able to finish. You freeze and detach because deep down, you know being able to address everything at once is impossible, and you don’t want to admit that you feel helpless in the face of that endlessness.

When you let yourself be pulled along by “everything that needs immediate attention,” your sense of priorities are not managed by your ethics, your needs, or your desires, but the needs and priorities of others. This is not your fault. Many of us have been taught by capitalism to accept the notion that our work is conditional to our worth. Many of us, living in an age of mass incarceration, have adopted punitive mindsets of good and bad and used them as motivation to “better” ourselves and others. Many of us, being raised in environments of emotional and/or resource scarcity, didn’t have the language or ability to ask or receive the care we wanted as children. Instead, we learned how to perform for attention. Instead, we imagined and believed there were reasons we weren’t worthy of care. We like being in control so we’re not helpless to that judgment: that’s more than we could ever bear.

In order to fight for freedom, we need everyone to be free. In order to be free, we must first confront the emotional conditions that keep us from living freely. If you keep going the way you’re going, you will exhaust yourself and detach from not only writing, but everything you do, for good. Instead of learning how to balance everything and everyone at once, you must change the conditions of your life. You will change them by choosing them. That is, you must imagine, and choose, the unspoken choice.

We cannot just survive in a world that needs to change. We must cultivate the world we want to inhabit without shame or fear. Choosing is the opposite of reacting. Reacting is being caught, without much consent, in someone else’s play with someone else’s words in your mouth. Choosing your own life requires being selfish. It requires trusting in abundance and not scarcity—that there is someone else responding to those calls; that we step in for each other. It requires detaching, not forever but for a little while, to actively cultivate the life you would fight for to live. In that life, you are driven by more than outrage, guilt, and shame. In that life, you have the courage to choose a daily life that aligns with your ethics and desires. In that life, you’ll be able to pay forward the work that someone else has done on your behalf in a sustainable way.

I’m not advising that you abandon all else and sequester in a secluded cabin for months. In fact, that is impossible for most people even beyond these extraordinary times, given the staggering levels of unemployment, childcare responsibilities, and simply looking after one’s mental health in the face of incontestable state neglect and violence, all of which I infer from the “everything” that needs “immediate attention” in your letter. But I do advise you to ask yourself why you want to write a response so quickly. Is there clout to be gained? A feeling you’re trying to write away? A political duty you’re telling yourself that you’re fulfilling, when there are many more existing and useful ways to be directing that energy? For there is no consequence for not writing. There is no consequence for not writing for a very long time. The critic Hugh Kenner once said to George Oppen, a poet who stopped writing to fully work in political activism, that he merely “took twenty-five years to write the next poem.”*

A dedication to art is not measured by output, but perseverance of a state of mind. You may find it helpful to practice awareness without response: for example, what would it mean to read without direction? What are you noticing today about a text? The world? What do you find pleasurable? What interests you about it? Start by practicing awareness of your own joys. Practice noticing your thoughts, then writing them down whenever they appear, rather than following a rigid schedule. Keep a notebook or a file on your computer or phone that you don’t reread or try to write from for a few months.

If your mind is allowed to play, it will collect, over time, a map of your desires. That map will point you toward not only what you care about but also what you need for your own care. Only then can you build the life necessary that will make your creative work possible.

* Dembo, L.S and George Oppen. “George Oppen.” Contemporary Literature, Spring, 1969, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1969). University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 159- 177. Online: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1207758

'How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?'

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

Hope this letter finds you well.

This letter is mostly about Chinese identity and craft and authenticity, which is a weird and fraught topic for anyone to write about. It’s also kind of long and annoying, so if you don’t want to respond to this letter, I understand.

I’m a Chinese-American writer, and a lot of my writing focuses on exploring my relationship with identity and being a kid of two cultures. Lately, I’ve been trying to question what I write about/who I write for/how my writing fits within the larger context of Asian-American literature/Chinese-American literature.

I don’t want to write in a “neutral” register, since a lot of readers have a tendency to read characters/stories as white unless explicitly stated otherwise, but I also don’t feel like I can really claim any of the stories and motifs I see a lot of other Chinese-American writers working in. I see all of these wonderful writers doing such brilliant and inventive things with stories they were told as kids, playing with cultural separations like Silly putty. I love those stories too and would love to be able to write something based off of them, but also: my parents never told me those stories. I’m worried that I’m drawn to them just because they’re strange and new to me and frequently get marketed as “Authentic Chinese Stories(TM)” by publishers and that they’re really not mine to claim/use in my work (i.e. that I’m just copying other writers who actually know what they’re talking about). My parents recently told me that I’d never have the intrinsic cultural knowledge it would take to understand Chinese literature and to focus on being a good American instead, which just makes me question myself more.

Right now, I’m working on a story set partly in Han-dynasty China/based in some local history from my parents’ hometown, but no matter how much research I do, I keep second-guessing myself. I worry that I’m telling a story based more on historical nostalgia/playing into the Orientalistic/imperialistic/exoticizing vision that shapes how Chinese history and culture gets represented in the West and what Chinese scholarship filters through to Western audiences. Given the way my non-Chinese beta readers seem to assume I’m an authority on ancient China simply because I’m Chinese, I worry more that everything I present will be seen as some kind of normative statement of historical accuracy the way so many writers of color get reduced to being spokespeople for “their” culture rather than individual voices among a crowd.

I know there’s probably no set answer to whether or not this is my story to tell and that different Chinese-American writers (naturally) have different perspectives, but any advice you have for working through this mess in my head would be so appreciated.

Best,
I don’t know if I’m culturally illiterate and at this point I’m too afraid to ask
New Jersey

Dear IDK,

You called your letter “long and annoying,” but I kept thinking back to it when I was deciding on which letter to choose this week. Your letter is not annoying, but it might be easier to call it that than to really confront the complicated issues you summarize in it. Your letter is long because it’s hard. I chose your letter because it’s hard. It’s hard to start my response to it. It’s hard to answer, honestly, as this is a difficult and personal question for me too, one that I’ve yet to put completely into words, but maybe what makes it complicated is what makes it worth exploring here with you right now.

As you state in your letter, different Chinese Americans have different perspectives, and if your letter was just about whether that was the case, then you probably wouldn't have written to me. So I’m going to try and unpack a few of the things I’m hearing between the lines of your letter, and maybe that will lead to something that will help you.

This is a crucial time for you because you are questioning who your reader is and what you hope to accomplish with your writing. It sounds like it’s important to you that you share context with other Chinese American and Asian American writing. However, you know yourself to be an imposter. You don’t know the childhood stories that other writers are playing with, so you feel like you can’t be in dialogue or context with them. On top of that, you’re worried that you’re just pretending to be interested in those stories because literary publishing has segregated and pigeonholed the Chinese American market into those narratives, and something in your head is telling you that you’re just another sellout.

Your dilemma about the literary context is mirrored, in miniature, with the situation around your story. You’ve picked a time and subject that you're interested in, but no matter how hard you work, your research is never enough. To make it worse, your non-Chinese readers believe you too much, so you write off their perspectives completely, and you’re getting crushed by a pressure you feel to represent all Chinese Americans, a responsibility you never asked for in the first place.

You’ve also been told that your sense of curiosity and responsibility about this is, at best, annoying. Your parents want you to get over this culture they didn’t bring to you. Your non-Chinese readers won’t believe you when you voice your worries of perpetuating racist essentialism. You seem to have, to each of these groups, a whole identity as either an American or Chinese person, when your experience of yourself is that you’re not enough of either.

That experience of belonging neither here nor there can end up making you feel like no one. And that voice in your head that’s saying your research is not enough, or that you don’t have the right material to play with—isn’t that same voice asking when you would have anything real to say, ever?

There’s a creative writing adage that goes “write what you know.” The problem with this is that Western imperialism has made it so knowledge is not equitably respected or valued according to who is doing the “knowing.” You want to be recognized as Chinese American, but you’ve internalized the idea that only the flashiest, most entertaining myths are authentic enough to get published. You want to write beyond these stereotypes, but you’re terrified of enacting the same kinds of essentialism that others have done to you. You’ve internalized that your work and your life are bridges for someone else to consume and judge some aspect of your identity—not only your racial identity, but your identity as a good, moral, and responsible person.

A deep evil of racist ideology is the pervasive way it weaponizes shame. Xenophobia reminds us that we are perpetual students with always one more thing to learn before we can be granted full protection from the state. Racism tells us that no matter how hard we work, how good we are, or how sincere we seem, we are fundamentally not worthy of dignity as full human beings—because a biological fact beyond our control is a moral flaw. Shame is the racism that lives in us.

When I hear you describe yourself as culturally illiterate, that shame is what I hear. Moreover, I hear another thing you didn’t mention in your letter: the fact that you must feel profoundly alone. Your parents may not have the vocabulary or education to advise you on your dilemma. Your readers don’t understand that shame, so they don’t see why it matters so much to you to get it right. Effectively, you’re trying to solve structural racism all by yourself in your work, and when you do, you’ll be able to say that you know something real—yourself.

The problem is, racism will still be there when you publish your perfect story. There will always be someone new who will assume who you are or expect stories that you can’t—or won’t—deliver. As Toni Morrison said, “the very serious function of racism...is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. ” And each of us who are oppressed by that kind of greed for power, well, we must each acknowledge it but take Morrison’s advice: do not mistake it for the work.

For you and I who have been oppressed, you must let go of the myth that writing is what you know. We know to distrust ourselves and to defer to someone who will always “know” better. We know to dress up our stories for entertainment and decoration; to always be ready and waiting to appease the next task that will be thrown over to us. We cannot write what we know. We must write what we want.

It may be that this story you’re working on is the one that you want. But it could also be that you feel a sense of responsibility toward your family and toward a past you feel pressured to represent. Or perhaps you want to feel connected to what it means for you to be Chinese American. Writing from research is very possible, as demonstrated by novelists like Min Jin Lee , but it could also mean that you’re craving community and, somewhere unconsciously, you don’t feel free when you’re working on this story.

Every day, there are people across disciplines working on how to dismantle racism, but there is no one working on what it means for you to write from a liberated and fulfilled life. What would happen if you were no longer a bridge, but an origin point? Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. It’s how we choose to understand that makes the writing of it worthwhile.

'I Can't Build a Daily Habit!'

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Yanyi,

My creative practice has been come and go since I was 13 and started writing poetry and playing guitar. I’d often go for months or years at a time dedicated to building my skill, but then get lost in the chaos of life and fall off with it, fall back into it, the cycle repeats. I’m now in a place in my heart where I feel very committed to my art and understanding myself. My thirst to develop a fluency in this artistic language with which I can communicate with myself and others drives me. However, I still I find it difficult to focus and build a daily habit. I’m an Aries and get impatient for ‘progress’. How do I make my creative practice more routine and joyful?

Searching for the songs of my heart
Fresno, CA

Dear SFTSOMH,

Before writing to you this morning, I wrote some emails and cleared last night’s dish rack. I hesitated to open your letter after I looked at the clock: 18 minutes before I’m scheduled to go on a run or, another reason for me to avoid writing this letter.

But here I am, writing to you. As an Aries myself, I can relate to the mythology of our sun sign—Aries start projects but don’t finish them, as it’s said, so I used to work until I did everything in one sitting to ensure a final product. I used to wait for large chunks of my schedule to be clear or for my to-do list to be checked off before I began on my work. I waited and waited for the perfect conditions that were always supposed to come, but never did.

When I read your letter, I heard the sincerity of your dedication and energy. I heard the months and years you’ve spent practicing and honing your skills. I heard your desire to make something that’s really, really big. I also heard the ambition and the impatience for “progress,” as you admit in your letter.

I want to address these last two things, because they betray some underlying assumptions you’re bringing to your work. These assumptions might explain why it’s been hard for you to cultivate the practice you seek.

Maybe your ambition comes from being power-hungry. More likely than that, though, is the possibility that you were raised in a community that believed art was not a worthy choice of occupation, and so in order for you to prove to them and yourself that you are right, you think you have to work to be the very best. Maybe you chose art because no one in your community believed that it was worth pursuing, but of all the things you started doing when you were 13, guitar and poetry were what helped you feel like you had a voice that no one could take away from you.

Moreover, you may have been taught that creative expression is supposed to be evidence of authentic passion and an authentic voice. You work so hard on your art because you see it as a version of yourself. When you fight to be the best at art, you’re fighting for your pleasure, your pain, and your complexity as a human being. You need to see progress because when your art—your true voice—becomes valuable, maybe other people will see value in you too.

This on-and-off cycle you’re experiencing is because you’re working on your art in a system designed to create value for other people. You’re stuck in the fantasy of the daily 9-5 routine. You’re blocked by the ever-optimizing merry-go-round of deadlines, accountability buddies, and faux-progress of punch cards. You think of spending time with your poetry and guitar as “building [your] skill,” but how perfect does your skill need to be before you let yourself just say what you’re thinking and feeling right now? How long will you work on the perfect sonnet while holding off what you mean to say in it?

You say you want to develop the artistic language to be understood by yourself and others, but you can’t develop art with the rubric of a businessperson. You don’t need to write a sonnet to say what you mean. But maybe you worry that if it isn’t flashy or pretty, that no one will listen? What’s wrong with the words you already know?

You fall on and off this cycle because unconsciously you know this need to operationalize your art will not lead to the joy and understanding you seek. In a never-ending cycle, you reject the work you love to do because you’re burning out on building cultural products before your inner thoughts even get a chance out the door. You tell yourself you’re not an expert because you’re afraid to fail. Because what if you try to sell something, finally, in exactly your own voice, and people reject you anyway?

I want to be clear that it’s not all on you. While you didn’t specify what the “chaos of life” you fell into was, I can guess it’s some combination of school, work, relationships, and surviving in the United States today. Maybe you had to work two jobs or maybe you were in school. Maybe you had to do both at once. Maybe you’re working twice as hard to learn about poetry and music because your parents and your schooling choices didn’t give you those opportunities. Maybe your dad died and though you never felt depressed, it was hard to do anything but eat, sleep, and work; maybe you still are coming out of this. I want to be clear that there are factors outside of your control, and they matter in who gets to make art. The playing field is not equal.

Art is merely the fragments, the detritus, of us becoming who we are in the world. Instead of starting a routine, reframe your art as a practice of attention. Your art is your thoughts, your feelings, and your outlook in history. It is already unique. Your only task, then, is to begin noticing your own thoughts. Notice your mind drifting and start writing it down. Write until you get to the end of what you’re wondering. Write it in a place that’s convenient and that is always near you, like your phone, and write it in a place where you can see the text piling up. Your art is always happening—when you’re washing dishes, making dinner, or waiting for a train—it’s just a matter of noticing and honoring it when it is. You can do the same thing with a tune that’s beginning to appear. Beethoven used to write notes on his shirt cuffs. I used to sing into a phone.

Don’t worry too much about having a “complete” thought as much as getting the initial sketch down. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. It may take many months for the same thought to recur and build on top of itself. In a world where everyone else is expecting something from you, make your art a garden you expect nothing from. Show no one. Ask for no feedback. Honor yourself as you would honor another organism whose life you have no absolute control over. Instead, get used to planting seeds that may take a while to grow or never do; notice the wildflowers overtaking the zucchini beds; the tomato stems bowing deeper with fruit week after week. Let your abundance show up for you. Trust that your work is enough.