Curated links.

Favorite Essays

• How I Almost Lost your Mother, Narratively
• During a Pandemic, Walk by David Jenkins

Favorite Short Stories

• Gone in the Desert and Never Coming Home, Andrew Porter (Via Electric Literature)
• Homeboy, Nancy Garcia (a beautiful love story)

Favorite Writing Advice

• What Matters Is Showing Up, Black Lipstick
• Why You Should Work on a Million Drafts at Once

This title is misleading. No one can work on a million drafts at once but I know that when I am working on one of my stories and I’m uninspired or I’m stuck or I can’t seem to move my story forward, I stop working on the story and work on something else—perhaps thoughts for a new story I want to write or polish that essay sitting in my laptop for weeks. And when I got back to my story, days or weeks later, it surprises me that I want to work on my story. The beautiful thing about leaving my story for a while and letting it sit for days and weeks and sometimes months is that ideas, bits of dialogue, descriptions, and scenes that I might be able to use come to me when I am walking, or when I talk with a friend over a cup of coffee, or when I travel to the countryside and stare at the mountains. When this happens, my instinct is always to work on the story with these new things right at that minute. But I resist this instinct and just jot down the ideas and descriptions and scenes in my notebook so I won’t forget them when I would get back to working on my story.

• Back to Basics: Benefits of Writing With a Pen & Notebook, Writer’s Digest

Favorite Sentences

“If a work is yours, you have to keep putting heat on it. Like love.” –What Matters Most Is Showing Up, Black Lipstick

“To live is to face your susceptibility to inexorable pain—the kind that gets thrust upon you without warning—at one point or another.” –Better to Keep Arriving and Departing, The Audacity

Favorite Paragraphs

“As I made my way along the edge of a cliff, one raven flew next to me at eye level, folded its wings, did a half barrel roll, opened its wings upside down, cawed loudly twice, and righted itself. It performed this maneuver three times and then flew to a nearby dead tree. It perched there and looked at me with its baleful gaze as if to say, Wadda ya think, silly human without wings? I was impressed and delighted, one more raven behavior I’d not seen before. If I were prone to seek signs in nature, a Carlos Castaneda sort of magical realism, I’d swear that bird was telling me to stop taking myself so damn seriously. I agreed, croaked out a caw caw in thanks, flapped my arms, and spent the rest of the day in playful wonder.” –During a Pandemic, Walk by David Jenkins

“There are things of which people never tire, no matter how often they are experienced: the first coffee of the morning, your dog’s furry skull beneath your hand, the scent of magnolia, coming in to a cozy house after a frosty walk. When you really love someone, their face is one of those things that never loses its power to delight. If you are lucky enough to have found that kind of love, the loss of beauty no longer matters.” –Can we ever make peace with losing our looks?, Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr

“Take the time you need for your work by any means necessary. Put it on the schedule. First thing in the morning if you can, or whenever a realistic time for you is. Identify it and make it nonnegotiable. If you have an unsupportive family that doesn’t believe in art or work, lie to them. Invent a freelancing job to give yourself permission to disappear for an hour or two, into a coffee shop or your car or the tool shed. There is nothing better than being able to give yourself what you need. Time is a gift when someone else lets you have it, but we’re not about gifts. We’re about entitlement. Become entitled. The book will only exist if you make it so. If you’re into the Tarot, this is all Magician. Give yourself the tools and space you need to bring it to life.” –What Matters Most Is Showing Up, Black Lipstick

“Put your ass in the chair and write. One hour a day, one thousand words a day, five hours, five hundred words, it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s consistent. Take your anxiety to work. I have a shot glass on my desk, and every time I show up with something weighing on me—fear, self-doubt, uselessness, death—I write the feeling on a piece of paper and drop it in the glass, and I let it sit in purgatory while I sit and do my work. Then when I’m done, I take it out. Tear it up or burn it or save it for the next day. You can’t count your anxiety at the end of the month, but you can count your pages. Notice what you’re showing up with and either use it, adjust it, or ignore it. Therapists advise you not to compartmentalize, but sometimes you should.” –What Matters Most Is Showing Up, Black Lipstick

“When I realized that it’s not my job to dictate how a reader should experience my work, or say what they must take away from it, it was actually comforting, in a way. I cannot imagine the pressure or constant frustration I’d feel were I constantly trying to control those things. I wrote a book that I hope will keep readers company in some good or needful way. I want it to make you think about your lives, your losses, your loved ones, and perhaps help some of you feel a little less alone. But what you glean from my story, what it means to you, is ultimately for you to decide.” –‘A Living Remedy’ Is Out Now, Nicole Chung

“Sometimes we fall in love with a place or a thing, and then, why not, in a moment of madness, we give up our whole lives and we marry it. We take the leap. Then it becomes easier to ignore, like the love of your life, sitting across from you at the breakfast table, scrolling through their phone. I guess that’s what I have done, even if I don’t always remember.” –The Louvre at Night, A Writer’s Notebook

“When I look at my darkest moments, it wasn’t a close friend who helped me through. It was art. It was music. It was reading. It was the ability to sit alone quietly with my thoughts.” –Maybe You Don’t Need a Friend. Maybe You Need Something Else. Jessica Wildfire

Etcetera

• Maybe You Don’t Need a Friend. Maybe You Need Something Else. Jessica Wildfire
• 7 books about hauntings by Black women writers, Electric Lit

Did You Know?

In 1855, in a town called Muher from Damo Kake and Ajet Amina in Ethiopia, when men were allowed to marry more than one wife, when women could not divorce their husband without his permission, when women were branded with Anqit—a curse believed to make any woman who divorced her husband without his permission to lose her mind or get struck by lightning while she was walking around town—there was a Gurage woman named Ye Kake Werdwot who, when she found out her husband had married two wives before her, told the local court that she wanted to divorce her husband, which led to her fight for women’s rights.

P.S. When you search Ye Kake Werdwot on Google or Wikipedia, except for a very short bio, you will not find this woman’s courageous true story. A few years ago, when the play opened at the National Theatre in Addis Ababa I watched the play three or maybe four times. If you want to know more about Ye Kake Werdwot, you can find it in Embita, a book in Amharic language, by Endalegeta Kebede.