Curated links.

An Article I Reread in the Past Two Weeks:

• When You Love Them Before You Realize You Love Them, Kris Gage

I like rereading the works of my favorite writers. Every sentence in this lovely piece is filled with beautiful sentences. Here’s my favorite sentence from this article,

“Sometimes you don’t realize even when you lean in for what could be your last hug, and they say something into your shoulder but all you can hear is the feeling of their voice against your skin.”

Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• When We Are Afraid
• Searching for “The One” in the Age of Social Media and Reality TV, Electric Literature
• The Fearless Activist Taking on Sexual Violence in Somalia, Narratively
• I Could Have Killed Him Twice, Narratively. When I read this story, I sat on the edge of my chair—wanting to know what’s going to happen next, what the fate of the woman I was reading about will be. After reading the piece, I was left with many images, images that kept replaying in my mind. This piece is full of drama, revenge, and one hell of an adventure. I think I will remember the story of Annie Cutler for a long time.

Favorite Short Stories I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• The City Can’t Replace Her Best Friend, Electric Literature
• No Depth Can Bury the Family Guilt, Electric Literature

Favorite Writing Advice I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• The Secret to Winning in Publishing, Heather Webb

Favorite Sentence I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“It’s sometimes NOT writing that helps your writing most, getting away from the computer, putting the pen down.” Jolene McIlwain: On Characters Intersecting Through Different Short Stories

Favorite Paragraph I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“And here’s the magical thing that has kept me writing all these years: the riffs that survive the culling necessary to go from Draft 26 to Final are the ones that, you will find, contain who you are as a writer; that contain the meaning that your subconscious “wanted” to convey. It will come as a surprise to you, what that final draft says, what it conveys. And it will seem astonishing, even to you, the person who wrote it, that a coherent story could come from those wayward, blurry, early drafts.” –George Saunders, Office Hours

Book Recommendation:

. Walking While Black by Polly J. Runyon-Sanders.

In her memoir, Walking While Black, Polly J. Runyon-Sanders fulfills her late husband’s dying wish and tells the story of the brutal, unprovoked beating of her husband by the police of a Native-American/African-American citizen.

Etcetera

• The truest thing I’ve ever read about making art
• I’m f***ing agitated, are you going to murder me?
• ‘My daughter’s murder wasn’t enough’—a Uvalde mother fights back