Most of my reading now is connected to the genocide unfolding in Gaza and to the poetry, essays, and stories of Palestinian and anti-Zionist writers. I’ve been spending time with the work of Rasha Abdulhadi and Mosab Abu Toha, for example. I’m also returning to writers with the kind of radical imagination and sense of justice that’s so needed, folks like adrienne maree brown and Diane Di Prima and Audre Lorde and Ta-Nehisi Coates and… basically, I’m trying to read to understand, to listen, to refuse to stop imagining.

One I’ve been thinking about lately: the trap of underestimating how serious you have to take yourself to write at all. I was talking about this with an artist-friend recently, and we were laughing at how absurd it can feel. You have to take your weird ideas and follow them as if they already matter, as if you’re creating something that counts. And you often have to do it alone, without knowing the outcome, for a long time. This doesn’t mean you have to Be Awfully Serious while actually writing—in fact, it helps to hold the work loosely, I think—but you do have to take the effort as a whole seriously. It has to carry some weight (even if it’s a secret weight) in your life for it to happen at all.

Maybe the time I cashed in our meager credit card points to book a couple nights at a bed and breakfast in a small town a few hours away. I took just myself and my drafts. This connects to the trap I shared. It was one of the first things I did as an adult to take my writing seriously. I had very little published at that point and was about 10 years out from my first book, but I didn’t know that yet. I just knew I needed to be with myself, in the work, in a concrete way. My life was threatening to eat up every creative instinct that makes me feel like myself, so I had to do something direct and tangible, as a kind of counterweight.

I deeply admire In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—two books that I couldn’t write but that I’ve been swept into as a reader and learned from as a writer. I love the feeling of “wow, only this person could write this, this way” when reading a book. That sensation that you’re witnessing someone’s voice and inner life emerge on the page in an unfettered way. I love sensing that even the writer got surprised by where the book went. I love when some fingerprints are left in the book. Some books feel very orchestrated in their form and in their unfolding, but those two books unfold almost organically, in the open.

Hold on, just a little longer. I’m right there with you.