A friend and client who works regularly with an HPE editor admitted to me in a phone call that she’d been using AI to assess her writing. She’d even inputted her editor’s letters and asked AI to predict how he’d react to her revisions. She is the sort of person you might call an early adopter, and she got on board with AI immediately out of curiosity. She has published two novels, one with St. Martin’s and another with John Hunt Publishing. I’m not using her name out of respect for her wish for privacy.

I was surprised and angry when she told me what she’d been doing, and I told her so. I don’t live (entirely) under a rock. I know that writers of all stripes rely on AI in various ways, but I heard a kind of glee and adoration of AI in her voice. And I hated the idea that she’d input our intellectual property into the maw of this beast that had already illegally consumed so much.

“What made you start using AI as an editor?” I asked her.

She explained that she’d never had trouble coming up with ideas or unfurling a plot, but she’d always been plagued by a sense that her work was clunky on a line level. Labored. AI had been so useful in the workplace for her. “It really helped me tighten and polish my professional writing,” she said, and she figured it could do the same for her fiction.

When it did prove useful in this way, she asked it to assess her writing more broadly: “For instance, I might write a scene in which I wanted the character to be petty, and I’d ask it more specifically, ‘In these two paragraphs, does this character sound petty? Or, is there enough tension in this scene?’”

Ok, I got how she was using Claude, but why?

“I really hate asking people to read for me, and then read this draft again, but some writers have a kind of insecurity and craving for immediate feedback. It became almost an addictive thing,” she admitted. This told me that some latent need was being not only met, but fed. Encouraged.

Still, I understood that one. Writing is a solitary, seemingly endless process in which we are locked in a room with our own minds. Who wouldn’t want a non-human entity to reassure us before exposing our work to humans?

Then I panicked. I imagined all my clients enjoying warm and fuzzy rapports with Claude and then ghosting me and the other two editors at HPE. And this is likely why I threw every argument I could at her: data centers’ threats to the environment; widespread job losses; moral issues (“This is cheating,” I told her); the rise of income inequality. Nothing moved the needle for her, so I pressed on: “Imagine being on book tour. How would you answer questions about your writing process? Would you admit that you rely on AI?” Nothing. I heard myself become more desperate, but I couldn’t give up.

I’d read her recent work, and while it was well-done in a generic, superficial way, while it may have flowed more than her unedited work, it did not in fact sound like her. When I told her this, she stopped. “What do you mean?” Finally, I had hit a nerve.

“It’s not you. I know you and I know your voice, and this wasn’t you.”

She sounded stricken, and I felt guilty for having pushed to this point (guilt being my default state), but also resolved in what I’d done. This was important, and I needed to take a stand, even with just one client.

We spoke for a little longer and said goodbye. I tried to silence my nagging guilt and focus on the feeling that maybe I had gotten somewhere.

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We didn’t speak for a while, maybe a few weeks, and when I next saw her, I asked her how the writing was going.

Her face brightened. “Great! I’m rewriting everything.” Her tone had changed in a way that surprised me.

I asked her to fill me in on what had had transpired that last heated talk.

“I was very conflicted,” she said. “I was defensive with my own self. I really wasn’t sure, and so I started asking AI about it, which is ironic. And then I started writing without AI to see the difference. I used some AI detectors to see what they thought. Some of them thought my writing was 100% AI, and some guessed 20%. Apparently my voice sounds like AI’s.”

“Oy,” I said.

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“I started really looking at what AI does and what it did to my writing, how it changed things,” she went on. “I thought, wait a second…this doesn’t sound like me. Of course some sentences were obviously mine (those that were quirky or rougher). They were definitely mine. But I could really tell the difference.”

“It was that obvious?”

“I could really see it. Initially I thought I’d sounded like a better version of myself. But when I went back and began to rewrite, to really let my words flow the way they flow, I began to see the difference. It was like realizing that I’d gotten a bad facelift. Eventually I began to have a gut feeling about the whole thing, and I really cringed at myself, and this writing. Who knows if this book will get published, and so what’s the point if I just have AI correct every sentence? Where is the me in it? My writing has to sound like me. If it’s not sounding like me, it’s not me, and it’s not what I want to produce.”

I asked her to tell me more, and she did:

“AI might have helped my writing get tighter in some ways. I don’t think that some of the cutting is all bad. I often ramble. But it over-polishes and it’s terrible with metaphors and similes and it repeats patterns too much, as in ‘it’s not this, but it’s that.’

Going through this whole thing helped me figure out that I do really value my voice. It’s funny, because my whole life has been a battle against insecurity of one sort or another. When I was growing up, I didn’t have a voice. I ended up hospitalized for depression. I definitely had a repressed self.

It’s funny how deeply important my own voice is to me, and I think because in one way or another, it has been repressed by a host of people and cultures and other elements. Not so much now, not in my late 60s, who the cares anymore, right? But it all of a sudden became apparent: wait a second, my voice is all I have. This process for me is about me, and what do I have if I don’t have my voice when I’ve actually fought for that my whole life?

My whole history has been a fight to be okay with myself. And my writing is my most insecure place. I’m not insecure about work or being a mother or a grandmother. For a while, AI really made me feel more confident, but at what cost? Not losing my voice is more important than anything else. This goes for my voice as a person and a writer, but also as a mother and teacher and grandmother and friend.”

It all got her thinking about the definition of art and whether hiring a freelance editor was cheating. She decided that it was not. “You need other people to bounce stuff off.”

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As a writer, I myself have never relied on independent editors, but I have traded work with friends. As an independent editor, I’ve sometimes struggled with feeling like I’m helping writers cheat somehow, but I’ve come to think that my role is more a saver of friendships and spousal relationships. (No writer should overly rely on those around them for input.) And I am more of a teacher and suggester than a rewriter. My goal is to get writers to sound more like themselves, to learn the right questions to ask themselves, and to learn to more deeply trust their own intuitions. Maybe this is justification, but I’m proud of what I do and thoroughly enjoy it.

I asked this writer to compare working with AI and humans as editors.

“AI just doesn’t have the depth and scope that a human does. It doesn’t provide the human emotional depth that you need when you really need help reworking something. AI can be a valuable tool for small picture line edits, but for bigger picture edits and getting an emotional reaction to what I’m really trying to do, an editor is much better.”

I had to ask, “Do I detect an urge to start using it again for that line-level tightening and polishing?”

“No. I don’t use it now,” she said. “I’m sort of scared of it in this weird way. Will I go and ask it research questions? I’ve asked it some, but only for research.”

I asked her if she had any advice for writers who are considering trying out AI’s editing functions.

“You just have to be really careful and aware of what it’s doing. It’s easy to get trapped and it’s fun to talk to it all the time. It always wants to please you.

If you do end up using it, take a step back afterward, a week or two, and then look at it again. For me, there was this gut-sinking feeling that this just doesn’t sound like me. You have to know yourself. I think I learned a really valuable lesson about my own voice, what it sounds like and why it matters.

Still, I’m not anti-AI. I understand why people would be drawn to it, for sure. I think there are good uses. But in terms of writing—this is about authenticity.”

I give her a world of credit for being open with me and open to changing her thinking.

It’s common knowledge that AI will get better, and maybe in the future it will come to mimic our true voices better. But for me, the preservation of this person’s—and my own—true voice matters. I enjoy putting down my own weird self on the page. Sometimes it’s a lonely process and sometimes I sound messy or lost on the page, and I so rarely feel that a piece is done, but there’s value in the fact that it was produced by me.

And so I’m going to continue to lean into my own flawed human self as both a writer and an editor. I myself think that imperfection and uniqueness will become more valuable in the future. Won’t we all start to sound the same if we let another entity think, revise, write, create for us?

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Also I’ve had a tough couple weeks, and find myself alternately wanting to scream from the heavens about the state of our country and crawl into a hole. I don’t feel that inspiring or uplifting or charming right now. I’m trying to become at least slightly less onerous.

A few weeks ago, when in NY for work, I had a dinner cancellation and so found myself in my hotel room with a bowl of takeout pho, scrolling Threads (Instagram’s version of twitter, with its reasonably high engagement and deliciously bitchy and liberal takes on politics and other public matters). This was the night of the last massive release of E-s-in files. Without thinking much, I began to read some of the documents that people were posting. I read and read, horrified by it the content, the breeziness of tone, the chummy misogyny and pedophilia and giddy violence, the gut-scraping depravity. Actually, as I read, I just kind of took in the words, winced, scrolled away, ate pho, came back and read a bit more, and didn’t fully experience much horror until later, maybe even the next morning or afternoon, when I really began to process it.

I am not overstating things when I say that reading these documents changed me. The world is not what I thought it was. There’s no need to talk about what I read— and I advise you to avoid making the same mistake and reading any of these files. Suffice it to say that whatever disgust and rage I experienced during #MeToo and over the endless abuses of this regime these past ten years all suddenly paled. And now our war with Iran, which I’m certain is connected in some way, at least partly, to the release of the files. God help every one of us on this planet. The corruption and depravity and greed is and has been so much worse and more widespread than we thought.

What to do with this knowledge? I’m still looking for an answer. When I tried to discuss this sensation of having been changed— without discussing the grotesque contents of the documents themselves— others either didn’t believe me or lashed out at me for being alarmist, too consumed with news, gullible (after all, couldn’t much of this be AI?), you name it.

I understand the temptation to reject yet more horrors as too much, untrue, or to blame me for being overly consumed with them. I understand the need to take breaks, long breaks, from the news, and to dose it. We have only one life.

A dear friend in London proved to be an excellent listener, thankfully, and I think this is because she and others abroad are just catching up to the full brunt of what’s going on here. Our mess is now becoming theirs, and they’re beginning to really feel the water heat up. She can still feel that heat, while many of us have had to just give in and boil, because what is the option? (I’m assuming you all know the boiling frog metaphor.)

As they always are, writing and work are safe havens. My dog is unfailingly loving. The snow, while overly, ridiculously plentiful here in New England, is bright and still and quiet. I have love and friends and incredible kids and my health, and loads to ground me. But I admit that I don’t know where to put the anguish anymore. Which brings me back to… Threads. I found the best description of the release of these files there, written by a wine importer in NY, no one I know. Lyle Fass, who has 304k followers, wrote:

“The release of the latest E— files is a psychological event. A mass exposure without containment. The worst material yet, sloppily redacted, partially corrupted, saturated with horror, now cascading through a public with no guardrails, preparation, or protection. Just screenshots, filenames, jokes, deletion. It feels like a rupture because it is one…There’s a reason prosecutors, moderators, trauma teams, even journalists use containment protocols: gradual exposure, warnings, context, framing. Because the human mind cannot metabolize certain truths raw… [The release of these files] functions like psychological warfare, whether or not that was the intent… the state’s message is clear: this is your problem now.”

The above thread (which is much longer) finally gave language to what I was and am experiencing. Putting words to overwhelming horror is often the first step toward distancing ourselves from it.

The word “containment” especially resonated for me, and I’d even recently used it in my novel as a way to describe what had been lost for me when my mother passed away from melanoma. I was thirteen at the time, and she was forty-two. A critical part of motherhood is containing horrors and dangers and poisons from our children. When you lose your mother young, you lose a certain sense of safety.

I am far from a perfect mother to my own kids, but I’m here, and I love them, and I did try to contain the world for them when they were younger, although this task became more and more difficult in an increasingly incomprehensible country. They’re old enough now to keep themselves informed in whatever way they choose, but I do grieve my ability to contain any of this shitshow for them and for myself, and for others around me.

I am trying to contain my own horror around those who can no longer process it. But if you find yourself in either position, bursting with the need to express your anguish and rage, or in the presence of someone else like me when you can no longer stand it, here are some tips.

First, for those like me:

-Find others willing to listen and engage with you.

-Minimize your exposure to the horror, but allow yourself to backslide, and then don’t beat yourself up for doing so. The house is on fire. It’s a tough thing to constantly ignore.

-Remember that your horror is a sign that you are still human, a sensitive and caring person who is still alive, still cognizant.

-Express whatever words feel correct. Write creatively or speak honestly. Get some of the emotion around this mess outside your body.

For those who have had it with people like me:

-Instead of saying, “I can’t hear it,” find something to validate, as in, “That all sounds awful.” And then be honest about your own state of mind: “I’m trying to be self-protective, so let’s talk about this another time, if that’s ok?” To bluntly silence someone right now is an act of cruelty.

-Understand that you need something too in that moment. You’re asking for something from this other person as well.

-Remember some time when you yourself needed to vent and others refused to hear it. What did it feel like?

Let’s remember that anger and horror and compassion—as well as the need for peace and quiet and sanity—in the face of tyranny are, in fact, healthy responses.

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Rajiv Mohabir, a professor of poetry at UC Boulder and a guest judge who selected Good's winning poem, told Newsweek, "‘What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left?’ the poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality. As a queer reader, I could also sense a queerness in the poem, a state of being between worlds and worldviews that really resonated with me then and still does."

2026 has sucked so far, at least if you measure a year by its news. So far we’ve already gained Venezuela (supposedly) and lost Renee Good. Both are horrifying events. I am staunchly opposed to both.

Both events are also more than just “bad,” a word I’ve come to dislike for its fairytale simplicity and frequent usage lately. I don’t know enough about Maduro to expound upon the complexities here, to be frank, but I do know that he is considered an authoritarian ruler responsible for Venezuela’s economic collapse, human rights abuses, and the fall of democracy there. I am reminded of a certain someone in charge of another country, ahem. Still, of course, what we did in capturing this man was illegal and flatly insane.

And here comes the more difficult part to write. I am devastated by the cold-blooded murder of this mother and poet, someone who merely protested something hideous, which is the kidnapping of US citizens and non-citizens. It does not matter that her wife mouthed off to federal agents and then (presumably, as it sounds on the latest video) called for Renee to “drive, drive!” just before jumping back into their car, just before some angry federal agent shot Renee point blank in the face. It certainly makes a better headline or post to only note that Renee said, “That’s fine, Dude. I’m not mad at you” and then the agent shot her, and muttered, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

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In between these two comments came her wife’s comments, which were these, to the agent who was recording on his phone:

“Show your face.” (No response, but he moved around to the back of the car, near where Becca Good, Renee’s wife, was standing.) “We don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know. This will be the same plate when you come talk to us later. You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Two other agents approached, and one tried to open Renee’s car door, saying, “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” Becca Good reached for the passenger door, but it was locked, and then she yelled, “Drive, baby. Drive!”

You know the rest of the story.

Most likely I would have said the same things that Becca Good did. I’m so angry at these masked armed men, so done with the destruction of our democracy.

The man who wrongly killed Renee Good had been a federal immigrant agent for 10 years. He served in Iraq. He’d been dragged 100 yard six months before that day by a driver during an immigration operation also in Minneapolis.

I know nothing else about him other than the facts of that moment, and I do not know what he was thinking the moment he pulled the trigger (I’m guessing he struggled with PTSD), but I do know this: Renee and Becca AND this agent are pawns. That one horrible and public moment is being used for nefarious purposes. Every minute of every day I will say that racism, violence, misogyny, autocracy, homophobia, transphobia, etc.. are wrong. They are cruel, they are counterproductive in a healthy society, and they are tools of dictators that keep us hating each other. When we are busy fighting each other, we take our eyes off of the larger threats. Hitler knew this. Vlad knows this. So does Don. He wants you to hate that immigration agent so that you don’t hate him. He wants his followers to hate Renee Good and her wife for the same reason.

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The attention economy continues to thrive, and all of us are depleted by years of this crap. Who wants to read long missives about veterans who need the income that immigration enforcement jobs now promise ($50k signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness, overtime pay, full benefits, no college degree needed)? Who wants to hear one more thing about how hard it is to be a man right now (not I, thank you very much)? We want good vs. bad narratives. We are tired, and these stories are quick and easy, and scrolling through them feeds our dopamine addictions.

We need to keep our eyes on the larger forces that wish us ill, in addition to the smaller forces that do. This does not mean that we need to excuse the murder of Renee Good or the kidnapping of Maduro, or even that we need to smile at our neighbor with the MAGA signs or try to understand our sexist boss. But we do need to acknowledge the endless greed that exists in this country and do our best to help the most vulnerable around us. We are, the vast, vast majority of us, being used.

I realize that this is a missive too and may read as too lecture-y or both sides-y for your liking at this moment. I understand, and am sorry if this is the case. If I leave you with one thing, it’s this question: who and what are behind the people pulling the majority of these triggers in this country? Let’s focus on that answer, and do whatever it is in our power to resist them.

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*****

“On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” by Renee Nicole Good

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

Being alive at this moment in history, and juggling family and work and fascism and aging and lord knows what else is, if nothing else, highly saturating. No one can process even a small portion of what each of us is made to process right now.

Saturation can also happen to a different extent when writing a book, because a book is a world, and as the writer enters deeper and deeper into the text, the vastness of the task ahead can often seem too vast. 80,000 words, give or take, are a lot of words.

For a while, I thought that it would make sense to collaborate on my next writing project, whatever that would be. I’ve mentioned that memories of slogging through my last couple novels were still vivid to me, and along with these came memories of an unhealthy heaviness that I wanted to avoid. As I’ve also said, I joined forces with an old writer friend, and we came up with a big idea, something skewering technology, autocracy, tech bro culture—a lightly futuristic The Office mixed with Black Mirror kind of thing. As we wrote, the country and the world continued, as they do, to spin out of control, and it began to feel to me, at least, that we were chasing something that could never be caught. My friend had his own reservations about the project, and collaborating in general, and we ended up putting it on ice and deciding to just serve as readers for each other. We agreed to write five pages of something, anything, and then to show them to each other.

Although he has yet to show me any pages (let this serve as a guilt trip to him), I sat down with no sense of what to write and ended up starting a new novel. I don’t want to say too much about it, but I will say that it’s not a book about the future and the massive hellscape that is our technoautocraticmisogynistocapitalism (no, that is not a word), but a very personal story about two people living in the 1980s. That’s it. It seemed antiquated and weird and small to just write about people, but then it felt good, and right, and doable. Setting something in the past means that the story is held in place by time, that it is closed rather than wide open and vulnerable to the gyrations of the current moment.

Five pages. Two characters. The smallness of these things were apparently just what I needed, and I haven’t stopped writing since then. (Ok, I have, but it’s been the holidays, and in general, I’m in the groove now, dammit.)

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I take my dog hiking a lot, and a few years ago, I texted my son a picture of Auggie looking out over a wide vista. Auggie is 13 pounds, part Chihuahua. My son wrote back, “Little dog, big world.” My son has the soul of a writer (poor guy….), and I think of his phrase often. The world is a lot to take in. We are, all of us, small dogs.

2026 has exploded into the room full of bluster and noise. May we remember to shrink our viewpoints, to take it one or five pages at a time, and keeping telling those smaller stories.

Thank you, technology, for revealing to me what I think is the essence of true art, which is humanity. I don’t think that something created by AI is art. And I hope that I will never feel the same seeing an AI-generated image like this one, presented to me after I asked Gemini to show me an AI painting of Virginia Woolf:

(I had to snap a photo with my phone, as apparently AI generated images are copyrighted, or at least un-copyable by yours truly. If they are copyrighted, um, a trillion authors should roll their eyes at the irony.)

as I do viewing this one of the same person:

(By Ray Strachey, oil on board, late 1920s, National Portrait Gallery of London)

One image is a regurgitation and the other a creation. One is a lie, and the other a truth.

I had not committed to finishing a book in too many years. This persisted until about a month or so ago, when I started something that feels like it could sustain my interest long enough to become a novel (I say with caution and trepidation, those human sensations that tell us something matters to us). I’d had a few false starts, and I suspect my skittishness stemmed from my awareness of all that committing to a book takes.

I finished my last novel back in 2019, and even then, writing had begun to feel a little anachronistic. I wrote Impersonation mostly in libraries, and it is a novel largely about the difficulties of writing. The protagonist, a ghost writer, is distracted by her young son and the financial pressures in her life. Her politician subject isn’t giving her enough material to fill the memoir that she has been hired to write. She can’t even finish reading a book, let alone write this one, and so she goes to extreme measures to do the latter. Impersonation is a novel about distraction, priorities, holding onto your own story instead of giving it away, and learning that you also need other people’s stories to become whole.

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I remember feeling antsy sitting at those library carrel desks and tables, jittery about the world and some troubles in my own life, and too easily distracted by social media. And what if I couldn’t even sell this thing? Was it worthwhile to even write anymore? It didn’t seem worthwhile financially, from what I’d heard of the business then. Sitting still, thinking, imagining, and creating a book-length story felt unimaginably difficult, and also kind of old school, I admit. Were enough people even buying and reading books anymore when they could spend daysweeksalifetime reading so much content, streaming, texting, posting, etc.? Maybe writing a book would become the next fermentation (sourdough starters, anyone?) or calligraphy, those quaint, hipster hobbies meant more for the maker than anyone else, although I do love sourdough and hand lettered notes.

It was then that I began meditating before writing, just sitting in my car parked near the library and listening to a few minutes of Headspace, a meditation app. It helped me slow down and stop whizzing through the various defeatist thoughts that kept my mind racing far too often.

My previous two novels weren’t easy to write either, but for different reasons. This jittery distractedness, this impatience and this “What’s the point” thinking, this gnawing sense that I should be doing more— for my kids, for the increasingly screwed up country, and more to earn money, more professionally, more, more, more— were new.

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Now I look back at that time and understand what I didn’t then, which is that the attention economy was peaking in terms of content volume. There was a glut, although monetization was at peak just before then. In the 2020s, there have been signs that the attention economy is waning, thank god, as we grow tired of the flood of AI-generated slop content and misinformation. But I don’t trust purveyors of AI not to do their best to turn back the clock and loop us back in.

Maybe at this point, AI can even write a better book by me than I can. After all, it’s scraped most of mine. More interesting to me is the act of finishing a book just using my brain, heart, and a keyboard (and, yes, Microsoft Word and Google for research), something that still seems Herculean, despite the fact that I’ve already finished three.

Writing is in some ways the ultimate middle finger to technology, especially if we reject generative AI in our work, as I want to continue to do. If one more person tells me how excellent it was to have AI answer some plot question, generate a new plot twist, summarize notes, analyze a medical question, write up some dreaded work task, I may clock them over the head. I realize that there are excellent uses of AI, and I can see myself summarizing notes with some assistance some day, and doing plenty of other things too, probably. I do hope that the gods of AI turn their attention more to matters of health and climate and less to monetizing their discoveries and shoving them into all of our faces. Then again, I’ve always been a late adopter, a cranky and resistant adopter of trends.

The lure of more easily and quickly writing a book is one of the reasons that people hire freelance editors, and many days I struggle with my role as purveyor of disappointing news. No one wants to hear that there’s no real way to skip steps, to rush or hack the writing process and still end up with a quality piece of art or even a very decent manuscript.

Here’s the good news, though: all the time and effort and struggle of writing a book? All the reading one does in one’s life before wanting to give writing a try? All the effort of working with a freelance editor and reading their long, thorough notes and copious line edits? The self-doubt, the vulnerability, the questioning, the persistence, the breakthroughs, the moments when those connections seem to make themselves on the page, the times when the words just pour out? All of this feeds a person’s soul. It enlarges the mind and heart. It brings us somewhere new, somewhere we’d never reach using AI or anything else meant to speed or ease the process.

I went for a walk the other week with the truly wonderful Adrienne Brodeur, who mentioned that she tries to think of writing as something she does for herself, a sort of gift. Admittedly, when in the throes of a tough revision or some other inevitable roadblock, this sort of thinking can be challenging, but in that moment her words matched my growing appreciation of the process, and my sense that the process is in fact the most rewarding part. The slow, excruciating, work intensive, profound, meaningful, deeply joyful and human process. I hope I can hold on to this mindset as I continue beginning to write this new book.

Although there is no real hack or cheat for good writing, there is self-care and the support of those around us, and I want to mention that applications for The Breakthrough writing retreat, to be held on Cape Cod in April, close on January 5. It’s an easy and short application— no references or perfection required. Michelle Wildgen (of Tin House and many excellent books) are putting together an exciting group of people who we know will mesh well. Please apply if you are interested.

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And although we work together less frequently, I’m also hugely lucky to have Michelle Wildgen as my co-host for The Breakthrough Writers Retreat. This is our small, cozy retreat on Cape Cod, where we gather to do individual coaching, write, discuss, and eat Michelle’s incredible food. Here’s a piece Michelle wrote for our newsletter, and I love how it captures the spirit of the retreat— and also my own values these days. We need all the community, variety of brainwork, warmth, and nourishment we can get.

Cooking for Writers

Last spring, before our first Breakthrough retreat, Heidi and I did so much advance shopping that we just barely fit it all into the car. I think I had a couple of grocery bags in my lap. It was clear we are both of the mindset that too much is better than too little, and also I live with a large man who has permanently skewed my sense of portion size. But once you do the yeoman’s work of shopping and hauling and unpacking, the cooking itself is a pleasure. Homemade granola and yogurt for breakfast, a big batch of soup and bread and fruit for lunch, Bolognese and vegan Bolognese or roasted chicken for dinner, wine, ice cream and chocolate, and there you have it.

During the retreat, I spent the majority of the time, when I wasn’t working, in the kitchen, which was accessible to all the writers who were working nearby in the living room or in the adjacent cottages. Several people were concerned that I felt downtrodden doing all this cooking, and I understand why: I feel the same way when I watch people doing something I find to be tedious drudgery, like gardening or playing basketball. But cooking at the retreat was exactly what I wanted to do. I got to keep busy but in ways it was easy to stop in order to talk to writers; I could take a break from reading and writing and simply work with my hands; I derived what you might call a freakish pleasure from depleting the refrigerator supplies to the point where we would actually have room in the car on the way home.

I am a huge proponent of any kind of work that calls on a different part of the brain than you usually rely on. For me, that is something visual and something tactile. For you, it might indeed be gardening, or painting, or jogging or building or fixing something. Writers often believe that any break from writing is a failure of some kind, but I believe this misconception is the result of too many smug writers who lacked appropriate life boundaries. I feel the same way about forgetting to eat while writing—never, in all my years of writing, have I forgotten to eat. I consider food a fine reward for a good day’s work.

That is the other pleasure of doing the cooking for a small and hard-working group. People love to be handed a good plate of food that doesn’t make them feel like they just ate a stick of butter, but does feel satisfying and nourishing. They love to be served food they didn’t have to think about, plan, or prepare. They get to do what all of us, including me when I’m at my own retreat, love to do, which is work when I need to work and walk out of my brain fog to find a meal waiting for me. And then we can all dive right back in.

One of the best-loved meals last year was a kale, tomato and white bean soup that I make without a recipe when I have plenty of time to (though it is mostly hands-off) and need something so vegetable-abundant that it makes me feel a tiny bit immortal. I sauteed a few onions in olive oil, then added garlic, celery and carrot, and let it all take a good long while to develop some flavor. Don’t rush that part, because it is the basis of everything. Then I added diced tomatoes and let it simmer a while longer. Then broth, bay leaves, any kind of canned bean like cannellini or butter beans, and whatever seasoning I want; I think this time it was salt and pepper and thyme. Then I let it all simmer gently for maybe a half hour, maybe an hour. Finally, shredded kale, but you could do spinach or chard or any other green you like. I finish it with olive oil, lemon, and parmesan. I regard soup as an opportunity to have good bread, so we had some garlic-rubbed toast as well. And that was it, but this soup gives way more than it takes. It is substantial without being heavy, good for you without preening about it. I highly recommend you make it, or come to Cape Cod and ask me to make it for you. In the meantime, I am always taking dinner suggestions.

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Everyone and their dentist’s cousin’s gardener seem to be freelance editing and coaching writers these days, as well as offering writing retreats, classes, and other experiences and training for new and established writers. Yes, I am bitter for obvious reasons. Who wants so much competition? Not I. But far, far more concerning to me is the possible exploitation of new writers, as well as the devaluing of the editorial process itself.

If you or someone you know is looking for a decent freelance editor, here are some very easy rules I suggest:

1. Google this editor beyond just their website. Have they worked with competitive publishers? Have they worked as an editor in the industry for any amount of time? What authors have they edited before? Have you heard of these publishers or authors? If you have not, and if your goal is to write better and you dream of publishing someday yourself, you are better off moving on and finding one of the many freelance editors with better credentials. Important note: a freelance editor cannot help you get published! But they can help you become a better writer, and if you yourself devote enough time and effort to this goal, if you devote yourself to reading a ton and working hard and taking in some potentially challenging advice, the odds of you publishing some day usually increase.

2. Google this author beyond just their website. If the editor is in fact a renowned author who now moonlights, that’s great! You’ll receive a more academic or craft-based edit, and perhaps some insight about the business from the author side of things. Has this person published with competitive publishers? How many books have they published, and how well were they reviewed? Following my advice from above, there are plenty of excellent writers who also freelance edit.

3. Find out what to expect before you hire the person. Ask for these things up front: the full cost (including the payment schedule), when you can expect to receive your edit, and what the edit will consist of. Will this be an editorial letter only? How long will the letter be? And/or will this be a line edit (marginal notes)? Does the estimate include follow-up time for questions and concerns? It’s best to be on the same page before you begin to work together.

4. Find out what kind of coaching they do. If you are looking for a coach, and this can include someone to help with accountability, spitballing plot or other craft elements, troubleshooting, talking agents and publishers, that sort of thing, how has this coach worked in the past? How exactly would they help with accountability? What kind of spitballing or troubleshooting have they done in the past? Do they assist with writing query letters and coming up with target agent lists?

5. Less is not more. Expect to pay between $50-$300/hour, or more. Freelance editors typically charge flat rates, by the word, or by the hour. Pay varies enormously and does not always match experience, but in general, the longer someone has worked in publishing and the more successful authors they’ve edited, the more they charge.

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I have a writer friend who relies on freelance editors regularly, and she’s shown me several editorial letters that run the gamut from stream-of-consciousness reactions to detailed professional and pragmatic feedback. There is a vast spectrum out there, and it’s best to do some due diligence before forking over your hard-earned money.

A word about gatekeeping. For better or worse, not everyone who wants to get published will get published by a big five house or a good smaller press. Amazon and AI have led to a flood of pirated and crappy self-published books, which is not to say that self-publishing is crappy itself. It’s not! And thankfully it is fast losing its stigma, but there are plenty of crappy self-published books out there. And you know my feelings about AI. There is a lot of crap out there, period. The same goes for freelance editors. This will offend some people, and so be it. If we want to live in a country whose books are published for reasons other than their fealty or lack of resistance to its overlords, we need to stand up for quality writing and editors. This may sound hyperbolic. I promise you that it is not.

Here are some recommendations for excellent freelance editors (beyond the three of us at HPE, of course, who have both published and worked in the biz, yours truly for seven lifetimes…):

1. Michelle Wildgen (Michelle is my co-host at The Breakthrough, former editor at Tin House Magazine and a whip-smart, funny human and truly excellent writer herself.)

2. 5E Editors (I worked with Jane Rosenman ages ago, and a friend was edited by Judy Sternlight. These editors are industry veterans.)

3. Jodi Warshaw (Jodi was a founder of Lake Union, an imprint at Amazon, and has loads of experience with commercial women’s fiction.)

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I moved my twins to their colleges this past weekend, and oh, was it a lot in every sense of the words “a lot.”

It got me thinking about college here in general right now and how this institution has morphed over time and continues to change, especially now in this rapidly consolidating autocracy. Pull up a seat, youngsters, because this liberal old crab has some things to say.

College has always been expensive, but in the past 20 years, it’s of course become bananas expensive, with the top of the heap running at sticker prices of about $97k (NYU) and $100k (Pepperdine). Some state schools are more affordable, but still steeper than one might think, so thank god for community colleges. It’s hard not to view the entire non-community-college higher education world as a racket. Shouldn’t education be a human right? Shouldn’t we want at least some of our kids to become doctors, lawyers, scientific researchers, historians, environmentalists, etc.?

Not really, say an increasing number of Americans. Just one in four of us now think that having a bachelor's degree is extremely or very important to get a good job (Pew). Not helping this trend is a regime that vilifies and punishes campuses for allowing protest, international students, and diversity initiatives. After all, college educated voters tend not to vote for said regime. Also not helping is a growing cultural sense— thank you, capitalism— that the only point of college is to milk as big an ROI as possible.

Liberal arts are defined as subject matters other than the professional and technical. Liberal arts curricula focus on teaching more generalized knowledge of the humanities and social, natural, and formal (like math) sciences, as well as fostering analytical, critical, and communication skills. To some people, a growing number it seems, liberal arts programs are indoctrination factories that lead students into “garbage fields.” Cuts to liberal arts programs have been well-documented.

Over the past year or so of the build-up toward high school graduation, I found myself worried about my own kids’ interest in the arts. Neither of them expressed a whiff of curiosity about business, law, engineering, STEM, and while this didn’t surprise me (apple, tree), I began to worry about the massive investment we were about to make. Did I really want to spend that much so that my twins could study theater or film or sociology or English, and then stand by and watch as they attempted to piece together a living the way that I have?

I gently suggested they explore psychology, computer science, any subjects adjacent to their interests that seemed to promise more lucrative futures—but in hearing my own hesitant tone came a mounting sense that I was of course being hypocritical, she with a master’s in creative writing (and a BA in poli. sci.). But really, my hesitation was about much more than this. As they sent out their applications and heard back, as they made their school choices and eventually began picking classes, I took in how young they were. Yes, 18 is old enough to do quite a lot, but it’s young enough be new to certain aspects of the world. It’s young enough to have had jobs selling pizza or being a camp counselor, but to my mind it’s not old enough to confidently commit to a career in business administration or electrical engineering.

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Even at their liberal arts schools, though, the focus on career is everywhere. You get the sense that the tour guides and admissions speakers are keenly aware, perhaps exhaustedly so, of the need to provide an assurance that students will leave college with good jobs. Alumni support, career centers, career advising, potential internships, networking events, and volunteer opportunities are a major part of the schools’ sales pitch. Schools with co-op opportunities like Northeastern tout the many job opportunities for students while at school. And some students even get to start school in another country if there is no room on campus for them in Boston.

This is when I start to feel ancient. What kid wants to move to Europe at 18, come back, and work doing landscaping or retail (both jobs mentioned by students when we toured the school) while paying or having their parents pay approx. $86k to “attend” Northeastern? Yes, Europe is Europe and jobs are important. Still, this seems not to be college anymore, but something else. I’ll call it a racket. My kids will both do work study throughout college. My daughter already got a job at her school’s bookstore. She’ll earn money for this, though not credit, and frankly, this seems just right to me.

All this focus on college as career training has left people like me—a person who is educated but not wealthy, a person who works in the arts and who cares deeply about humanity and joy and human connection in addition to paying my bills and not starving— feeling like a person without a country right now. All this job talk and smug eyerolling about liberal arts as if they secretly involve sitting around the cupola of an ivory tower and nibbling on Cuban cigars while discussing Kant and Chaucer. My liberal arts education taught me about radical political theory, which helps me understand this current shit storm. I learned about economic instability, cultural movements, the power and uses of language, and a multitude of other topics that, yes, lead me to vote with my heart as well as my brain and my pocketbook.

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My kids don’t know who they are yet. They deserve the chance to explore, to try out different fields and jobs and meet different people, to learn more general things about the world and themselves before studying exactly what will help pay their bills. The kids, my ex, and I pasted together our paltry 529’s, big scholarships (yay kids!), that aforementioned work study, a bit of help from his parents, loans, and blind faith. Although I do still worry about their financial futures in these times, I feel enormously optimistic about them as humans. I’ve been reading up on the horror that is transhumanism, and it makes me even less optimistic about our tech oligarchy, and believe you me, this optimism already rests somewhere around zero percent. Without regulations, AI and the tech world are infinitely dangerous. We need our human qualities like imagination and intuition and resilience and humor, even shame and mockery (I am all for Newsom’s trolling) in order to come up with ways to resist this unchecked greed. We need to maintain our authentic human selves more than ever right now.

I’m a weirdo. I’ve never quite fit into any one world. I worked from home for 18 years doing a job that allowed me to make my own hours, and so I fell into some strange gap between being a working and a stay-at-home mom. I’ve published books and edited them. I now work in the gaps between writing and publishing and technology and to some extent even audio and a bit of psychology. Although I’m now an empty nester and working from home can be very solitary, I wouldn’t trade the editing, commissioning, writing, and coaching that I do for anything. I landed here after not knowing who I was or what to do for a career between the ages of 18 through about 25. In those years, other than being in college, I painted houses, worked for Greenpeace, bussed and waited tables, became a freelance writer, and worked as a counselor at an at-risk youth shelter. I also drove solo all around the American southwest and west coast, camping and staying in hostels and at one point joining a hippie bus tour of Humboldt County and San Francisco. Exploration may sound to some like a privilege, but I see it as a necessity. And a person does not need to travel or work numerous disparate jobs in order to explore and have adventures. They just need to allow themself not to know what is next, and to try different paths and meet different people. To try being different people themselves. Eventually a clearer sense of self emerges, and with that a deeper and truer sense of what makes sense life-wise and career-wise.

Our college-aged kids are being forced to cosplay adulthood at great risk. They are being asked to skip a critical step, to see education not as an end in itself but merely as the means to a (capitalist) end. As much as I fear my kids’ future financial prospects— and good lord, there is so much to fear right now— I also want them to explore and have adventures. If we shave away our kids’ sense of the unknown and exploration, aren’t we doing them—our ourselves—a massive disservice?

In just a week, both twins have made new friends, learned their way around campus, started an assortment of classes, begun to wander around the cities where their schools are located, joined clubs, signed up to try new activities, and gotten comfortable living with nice roommates who are very different from each of them. Although I was and am sad to see them go (a post about empty nesting is sure to follow at some point), I’m more excited to see them become more of themselves. And I’m sending love and strength to all you parents who recently said goodbye to your own kids. We got this. And so do they.

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Magnus Enckell, The Lovers, ca. 1904, oil on canvas, owner unknown. Glass negative, dry plate.

So often naming something is liberating. Saying or writing, “I am angry at [fill in the blank]” externalizes a tight, stuffed up, oppressive feeling and sets it free. Externalizing hard emotion is of course the foundation of therapy, and can be endlessly useful.

But I’ve been thinking about the opposite, how best to offer up words and story that harness something greater than black symbols on a white page. How do we place these symbols together in such a way that they do not slide past our readers’ eyes, given the multitude of information that floods them every moment? How do we say or create things that land inside other people and ideally even awaken us and them? How, essentially, do we connect more effectively with readers and with people in general?

Creating meaning and resonance both within the writer and the reader is often not a matter of using direct language. It’s a matter of tapping into something more oblique and strange, something I think of as nearly primordial. Often doing so is accidental. The act of trying too hard places metal scaffolding around something ethereal.

Beginning writers are taught to rely on the five senses in order to bring a story to life. In my tenure at The Best American Short Stories, I read an endless number of stories that kicked off with all five senses. It’s not the inclusion of these senses that’s problematic— it’s the roteness with which they are too often recounted (see as problematic the verbs “is,” “smell,” “sounded,” etc.), as if a new writer is checking off a task on a list without slowing down long enough to inhabit it.

I cannot advocate loudly enough for weird language. For bold language, words that surprise, ideas that come through you, not from you. A good way to access this part of your soul is to write quickly, allow yourself that shitty first draft. If you time yourself and write for ten minutes, maybe you’ll end up with a paragraph or two. Much of it might be messy nothingness, but there may be one or two words in there that will lead you toward a portal you did not know existed.

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I am writing this on Cape Cod, where I’m staying with a friend and working on a novel. I have two books with me, and so randomly, here are two very different examples of what I mean by tapping into the reader’s subconscious:

“When you wet the bed, first it is warm and then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced.” -A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

“For the first time in her life, she’d taken to wearing pantyhose, and not just one pair but two, along with black compression socks. It wasn’t a great look, but she felt the need to be held, squeezed…When she removed the socks: remote sadness, nothing serious. This upset people (her fiancé), who expected visible signs of distress (inconsolable sobbing), especially given her mother’s suicide when Greta was thirteen…” -Big Swiss, Jean Beagin

Here are veeeery different books, but two moments equally moving to me about the enormous influence of mothers. These are “show, don’t tell” moments, and I suppose that “show, don’t tell” is a great rule for a writer when the writer wants to evoke emotion. But telling can be just as useful if used with intent and honestly.

What frightening and relentless times these are. I’ve tried to slow down when I can and both watch for and create meaning. A surprising sentence or two in a client’s work, a friend confessing to “quiet quitting” her relationship, deciding that one of my characters who feels impotent should choke on and then be rescued from a crumb of biscotti: these weird little moments when language not only matches but elevates the things it describes have struck me lately. These moments have all but saved me, as they’ve reminded me that we still have the power to fill or lighten or move ourselves and others.

Albert Edelfelt, Summer evening, 1883, oil on canvas, owner unknown. Glass negative (and positive), dry plate, 385 x 335 mm, Daniel Nyblin ca. 1883.

(More of these images of glass negatives and other wonders can be found in The Public Domain Review, a treasure trove of found words and images.)

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They’re my only kids, these two. When multiples are your only kids, they move like a storm through your life. Potty training is potty training X 2, and then you’re done. I’ve always envied parents who usher one kid at a time through life’s major milestones. People often say, “Oh, it’s the same when with more than one, and crazier, because you have to juggle different needs!” I wouldn’t know as mine have always been the same age, and truthfully these parents without multiples don’t know just as I don’t know what it’d be like to be them, so these people should can it. To my mind, we’ve all gotten a little rusty with the empathy thing. I’m no better than anyone else— I often assume other people are as harried, strapped, liberal, etc. as I am.

A couple weeks after my kids graduated, Keith’s son, who lives up in New Hampshire, graduated from his high school. As we drove past the T—-p sign at the end of the high school driveway and walked into the fairly small gym, where only fifty kids would graduate, I was reminded of the largeness of our country, the variety of high school experiences. We found our seats and then came a recording of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and in marched the kids, each with a decorated cap (I was jealous— this was forbidden at my kids’ school). We saluted the flag and took our seats. Keith’s son was the valedictorian and gave an awesome speech full of thanks to his school and teachers, as did the salutatorian/skater king of this town and a sassy, fabulous middle school teacher. This small town would see a far smaller proportion headed to college. In general, college is no longer taken for granted. If someone’s kid is graduating from high school, it’s best to ask, “What’s next?” With staggering costs and a wobbly economy, this is understandable, if more than a little sad to me.

I looked around the gym at the families of these fifty kids, and was reminded of my experience with the eclipse. Here we were— this room full of strangers of varying political, social, religious, economic backgrounds— all focused on our kids. Loving our kids, and watching them with pride and awe as they moved forward during this big moment in life. The differing towns really weren’t all that different, at least on graduation day. For two hours, I had to believe that none of us were pissed off about our own lives and our own lots, about the ways that politics and the economy were screwing us over. We all turned our gaze outward and it felt SO GOOD.

There are, of course pros and cons to growing up in a small town and a larger town, rural and urban settings. But we’ve lost that balanced discourse lately, filled up as we are by hatred and vicious propaganda. We are being dehumanized, and the moments when we are able to just sit and be together and be human together are pretty wondrous.

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My kids only have two more months home before they head off to college (my son to Brandeis and my daughter to Vassar). Given this fact, the continuous swirl of wretched news, the fact that Keith is still looking for a job (healthwise he’s almost fully healed after heart surgery, though, thank the lord), it’s a little hard to march happily into the future. And so as often as possible, I’ll try to keep my gaze on my kids, who make me absurdly proud. My daughter is a hugely talented, kind, strong, bright kid planning to study drama and sociology. My son is a wildly creative, empathetic, honest, intelligent kid planning to study some combo of English and film and computers. Keith’s son also has a bright future in neuroscience at U Maryland, and will surely light up his campus with his broad wisdom, open-mindedness, instinctive caring way, and love of/knowledge of music and film and books. All three are funny and all three are unique, and the world is already and will be a better place because of them, if I do say so.

And I’ll keep my gaze on my business, which feels like it’s really solidified this past year. I have the perfect little team, with two other editors, and together our collective is providing a ton of great coaching, editing, commissioning, and consulting.

I’ll keep my gaze on my writing, specifically the new novel I’m cowriting with a friend. It’s the first time I’ve really developed an idea BEFORE sitting down to write, and already it’s paid off. It’s been a hoot to collaborate on a book for the first time.

These are not easy days. I’m wishing you all moments of outward gazing, of looking and finding the humanity and unity that still exist. Onward into summer.

Our scarecrow needs some new pants, but is otherwise ready for graduation.

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But I’ve been thinking about how well it went and considering offering one or two more retreats in this model. The model is this, inspired by my own DIY writing retreats: Michelle and I organized three nights at a small compound on Cape Cod. We put out a call for applications and chose ten talented writers (it was a surprisingly hard decision—neither of us expected the response we had). These writers got:

1. One-on-one Zoom sessions with either Michelle or me.

2. A group introduction so that the writers (who would be traveling from as far as Alaska, Texas, and California) could meet each other and plan carpools from the airport.

3. Private rooms and insanely great homemade food, thanks to Michelle’s cooking prowess. I prepped and cleaned in the kitchen (and made scrambled eggs!). And views of a huge pond:

4. Morning discussions.

5. Michelle and I were available at all times to help troubleshoot, vent to, and otherwise support the writers.

1. Lunch followed by walks, social time, or solo time if preferred.

2. Afternoon quiet writing time, followed by wine and cheese, followed by dinner, then games or practice readings.

3. A group of potential new friends and fellow writers.

4. Follow up one-on-one Zoom sessions with Michelle and me.

Yaddo and MacDowell and other retreats are gifts to writers, of course, but can feel very solitary to some. Bread Loaf (or even Kauai Writers Conference or other such conferences) is also a gift, though to younger writers, but can be overstimulating and doesn’t tend to offer much time or bandwidth to actually write. We wanted to create something that offered the best of both worlds.

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Notably missing from this retreat was workshopping, or one person’s writing being critiqued by a group of peer writers. When people read their work aloud, the others were asked to limit their feedback to the positive. This sounds Pollyanna-ish, but I promise that it was not. My impression was that limiting the feedback freed up this group of writers to gain momentum with their own work. People felt safe. There is a time and place for workshopping, but one of the goals of The Breakthrough was to offer these writers a chance to leap forward both with their word count and their general level of motivation.

Also missing was the usual latent (or not so latent) press of competition that is common at more typical retreats and conferences. I didn’t sense any jockeying for position. The group was small enough to fit around a dinner table, and from the get-go people seemed more interested in supporting each other than one-upping each other.

So, to writers who might be interested in this sort of thing, here are some questions as Michelle and I begin plan our next Breakthrough:

1. What would the ideal length of this sort of retreat be for you?

2. What other locations would appeal to you? I’m hesitant to choose somewhere overly fabulous, as that would provide too much distraction from the writing, but I also don’t want to choose a location that’s a turn-off.

3. If you are on fence about this idea, what would push you on or off?

Here are some testimonials from our crew this year. Please consider applying to our next Breakthrough and other retreats we may hold! I’ll keep you posted as plans evolve.

“I think there was a perfect balance of structure and ease. I felt a great chemistry among the group which I attribute to the leaders for helping facilitate a very warm and positive environment.”—SM

“It was wonderful to be in the company of dedicated writers, and to have the support of such fantastic and established editors. It boosted my confidence and helped me feel a sense of connection and purpose.”—ML

“I appreciated the balance of creative time and communal time. The structure of the day was ideal—gathering for casual conversation, then having a more directed conversation and/or craft discussion prior to a solid chunk of writing time. The break midday was restorative; it was easy then to return to another focused period of writing. Come evening, I enjoyed hearing about what others had achieved or discovered during the day. It was beyond fantastic having two sharp and extremely generous editors offering insights and support. And what a joy it was being in company with this very special group of kind, curious, and talented women! (Oh, and those delicious meals...)”—RR

“[There was] serious time to tackle big sections of my work, which is so difficult at home. Michelle's and Heidi's ongoing advice to the Group and the interactive discussions on the craft of writing between the writers provided a wealth of information, book references, publishing ideas, and story structure as well as many other tidbits too plentiful to list. The food was amazing, healthy, and plentiful. Meeting the other writers and hearing their challenges and successes was extremely informative and they were all nice people with fascinating writing projects. ”—ML

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What a strange thing it is to be alive as an American right now, and to watch rather helplessly as such vast change transpires each day and yet to have to continue doing what we did the previous day— work, feed the dog, the shepherd kids, clean the house, etc. Every facet of our lives is being defunded, it seems: education, science, medicine, health, the arts, consumer protections, the environment, etc. Also distressing are the extrajudicial deportations often preceded by sudden and sometimes violent kidnappings (particularly and horribly frequent in Massachusetts right now).

I want to explore another threat running alongside the many that stem from our least favorite demented felon/uncle and his posse, and that is the threat of influence that comes from AI. I know many people who love it, and I understand why they do: it is powerful as hell. It can make many of our daily tasks and our jobs easier. It can perform customer service, write term papers, create marketing copy and campaigns, diagnose, teach, research, I could go on forever—and at scale. We don’t have to work so hard if it does the work for us.

And we can use it in other arenas too. More and more people have AI companions, platonic and romantic and, yes, sexual companions that provide understanding and even something that feels like love (I am someone that sees love as a purely human emotion). People use ChatGPT as a therapist, a parent, a teacher. To those who may not know about this yet, I promise you, none of this is fringe stuff. Over 100 million people globally interact with personified AI chatbots, including AI companions. Some estimates are closer to 600 million people. We are well beyond just using AI to keep us from talking to customer service reps.

My kids joke that I suck at identifying AI pictures on instagram.

Four days ago, Zuck said, “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do.” He went on to say that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections than they currently do—and that AI friends are a solution. “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends…For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.”

Now, if you are like me, you won’t take friendship or therapy advice from a newly bro-ed out dude whose platform has been accused of contributing to horrific mental health outcomes, spreading fake news, mining and exploiting user data, and prioritizing profits over privacy, sanity, and democracy.

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Anyhoo, I asked AI (google’s newest bestie) who the largest AI companies are, and here’s what I learned: Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon, followed by Apple, Meta, and Tesla are the biggest. Remember who stood proudly by our uncle at his inauguration. But what can Corrupt Uncle do for AI? He can’t even remember that Mattel isn’t a country.

Perhaps least worrisome, he can remove those pesky regulations that Biden began to put in place. But keep reading.

Next I asked AI about the potential of AI to control people, and the response was far too long for this post, so I’ve condensed it here. Note that I am not using quotation marks here, although most of this is cut and pasted from AI. (Ok, the bold font is all mine. But I’m returning the favor after learning that all of my books were used to train AI, as well as the 18 volumes of The Best American Short Stories that I edited, as well as pretty much every book written by everyone I do and don’t know and believe me, I know a huge amount of authors.) Here’s what I learned:

• AI can enhance and automate surveillance technologies, leading to the potential for mass monitoring of individuals and erosion of privacy. (My take: imagine one central source knowing that you attended a protest, got treated for chlamydia, or sheltered your daughter from a physically abusive relationship.)

• Facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and behavioral prediction tools can be used to track individuals, predict their actions, and even identify potential dissenters, potentially chilling free expression and hindering social movements. (Me again: you cannot stand your loudmouth neighbor who collects guns and loves Corrupt Uncle, and you give this person the finger behind her back a couple times, mumbling that you’d like hurt her after she runs over your new rose bush with her Tesla Cybertruck that her billionaire parents bought her. You’re not hugely political. You vote independent. But she is trying your last nerve and you complain about her and her political signs and cybertruck to everyone you know. You can fill in the rest here. Yes, I’m laying it on thick to make a point.)

• The widespread use of AI-driven surveillance can be particularly problematic in authoritarian regimes, where it can be employed to suppress dissent and maintain control. (Me: Imagine ads on facebook showing the violent arrest of people in your state. Now imagine these ads are actually posts. Many of us don’t have to imagine this anymore.)

• AI can be utilized to create and disseminate highly persuasive and targeted propaganda and disinformation campaigns. (Me: see X formerly known as twitter, Fox News, etc.)

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• Generative AI, capable of creating realistic text, images, audio, and video (deepfakes), can be employed to manipulate public opinion, incite social division, and even interfere in elections. (Me: see Dumb Uncle as Pope or this and click on any link embedded within. Or the pic below that—shockingly—is not real.)

  

• AI-powered social media bots and troll armies can amplify propaganda, harass individuals, and create a false sense of consensus, making it difficult for people to discern truth from falsehood. (I’ll stop, but after each point, try taking a moment and imagining the impact of each one. Some you won’t have to even imagine.)

• The increasing reliance on AI in critical decision-making processes, like loan approvals, job applications, and criminal justice, raises concerns about fairness, transparency, and accountability.

• If AI algorithms are trained on biased data, they can perpetuate and amplify existing societal inequalities, leading to discriminatory outcomes.

• The "black box" nature of some AI systems, where the decision-making process is opaque, makes it difficult to understand why a particular decision was made, raising concerns about accountability and redress.

• Over-reliance on AI decision-making in various aspects of life could potentially erode human agency and decision-making skills.

• The pervasive influence of AI-driven recommendations and personalized content could limit exposure to diverse perspectives and reinforce echo chambers, potentially impacting independent thought and critical reasoning.

To reiterate, the above is AI’s take on the dangers of AI.

The twin threat of an authoritarian government and the tool that has the power to give them access to the hearts and brains and every one of their citizens is… a big problem.

What to do? This is not about widespread organized resistance, although of course that is necessary right now. I’m writing this to ask you as intelligent, creative human beings to hold tight to your intelligence and creativity.

This means not telling AI your innermost secrets, lest they be used against you in some way.

And continuing to do creative things that start in your own brain and heart, not ideas that ChatGPT or some such has given you— it has enough ideas, and so let’s not give it more.

And continuing to seek joy that stems from human experiences— togetherness, travel, sex, friendship, adventure, theater, film, music, sports events.

And reading and doing word games and going to bookstore events and touring museums and old mansions and giving yourself intellectual experiences that are not offered in three sentences on a social media post or via radio or podcast.

And meeting new people who are different from you, and listening to their viewpoints and not trying to change their minds. My new favorite phrase in the face of someone different from me politically is, “We can disagree.” We can disagree peacefully. It is possible. It is critical.

And being weird. Being messy, impatient, hyper, intuitive, anxious, numbed out, addicted to popcorn and romantic reality TV and literature and my dog—well, that’s me of course, and you should be you, but be the most you you can be, not what some bot tells you to be or think.

It’s Mother’s Day, and as someone who grew up largely motherless (mine passed away when I was 13), I’m not always good at mothering myself, so to all the moms out there— let’s not forget to do this, mother ourselves and preserve our identities, our brains and hearts, our families and world.

Happy Mother’s Day to you all.

Also AI, but come on, doesn’t this look real to you?

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Did reading this stress you out? I’m sorry if I did. I often encourage clients not to write this sort of thing, fiction or memoir so stuffed with conflict that the reader has no breathing room. Crafting a narrative means curating, prioritizing, paying attention to rhythm, manipulating the rate of revelations—and producing a story that is digestible and ideally resonant for a reader. If only life could heed this advice.

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Two Boston publishing people I know passed away last weekend: Alan Andres, my first boss, and Esmond Harmsworth, a larger-than-life literary agent and friend.

In the fall, my twins will head off to college. I experience their time with me as a precious, rare, and dwindling thing. As divorced mom with 50/50 custody, I regularly mourn all the days I’ve already lost with them, and pre-emptively grieve what’s to come.

There is no human way to process everything in our lives right now. By this I mean that there is no physical, emotional, psychic, or spiritual way to process it all.

I find myself tricking my brain into altered states, latching onto trite -isms like the one I used on the morning of Keith’s surgery: “There’s no way through except through.” There’s no way through your partner’s heart surgery but through it.

I started a new writing project, a novel that I’m collaborating on with a very old friend. We want it to be funny. He’s a humor writer, one of the funniest people I know and working with him is like working with a favorite cousin. Remember “decorative gourd season”? That’s him. This project is a gift right now.

On the morning of surgery, I wanted to hold my kids close. I wanted to escape into the writing of this thing. I wanted to sit with Keith and do Spelling Bee in The Times and drink coffee and marvel at the new green on the trees (apparently I am getting old). I did not want to sit in the hospital yet again, waiting for Keith to emerge from major surgery while the country roils.

My time with Keith has never been crisis free. It’s absurd the bad luck this man has weathered— two brain surgeries, two jobs lost, both parents passing away all within six years. What kind of God allows this? I go to an exercise class twice a week, and a woman there attends church most mornings. She offered to pray for Keith during surgery, and even enlisted a few others in her church to do the same. I am atheist, and yet I wanted them to pray. Shouldn’t we all take whatever we can get?

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As I waited for Keith’s surgery to finish, it occurred to me and not for the first time that I love hospitals, the sense that care is everywhere, that our problems are for the time being also someone else’s. The quiet, the seriousness, even the cafe, the cleanliness. I’m weird this way. I love the feeling that there are always good people around to help. I don’t have that feeling outside of hospitals so much anymore.

Keith and I had just finished watching The Pitt, a series set over 12 hours at a Pittsburgh ER, and though it sounded kind of stale and even featured Noah Wyle from that long ago show, ER, I loved it. The characters! Like Mel King, a young doctor with preternatural calm and the ability to quietly accommodate everyone and everything. She is the type who brings a teddy bear to a child about to receive terrible news and remembers the name of a patient’s daughter. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of character portrayed on screen before, someone this generous and this vulnerable. You can see her body struggling to take it all in. She blinks. She twitches. Amidst the chaos of the emergencies, she takes a moment to slip in her Airpods and listen to the sound of ocean waves. And then a mass shooting occurs and over 100 injured and dying people flood into the hospital. She snaps to attention, and manages to keep an even keel and bark orders where necessary, and care, and pay attention to these people before her. She breathes hard, she blinks rapidly, she lurches from dying patient to dying patient, and I think she is a model to us all right now. The best we can do is to care and be kind and give what we can, but to also stop and listen to the waves when need be. Because none of this is normal.

Keith’s surgery was a big success. He ended up getting a double bypass and they did not need to use arteries from his legs or arms, which would have complicated his recovery. I’ll pick him up from the hospital tomorrow. I’m so, so grateful, if also exhausted, anxious, and a million other things right now.

I do not write all of this for pity or attention or shock value, rather to demonstrate that one of the many gifts of writing is that we get to create a world that makes more sense than this one does. We get to distill the chaos, to sift for gold. What are the stories that you’ve loved reading or watching or telling, and why? If you’re a writer, I’d try to look to them rather than life when it all becomes too much.

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Back to language. AI is ready and willing to speak, write, and talk for us. So is our government. We can in part protect our freedom and individuality by refusing to use stale language. What we say and what our characters say matters. We just have to say what we mean.

Of course we cannot always be poetic and surprising and original, and early drafts are all about placeholder language. But in the face of the huge task of writing a book (or simply getting through a day right now), it’s tempting to wilt, to reach for some familiar and low-hanging fruit (like “It takes a village” or “Do your part”) and just keep nudging your character forward, one step after the other, taking note of her surroundings and not much else. But we only write well and live with integrity by refusing to become complacent when possible. We have a better chance of telling better stories and even publishing said stories when they are original.

I’m now going to about-face and talk about romantic reality TV, especially the shows Love is Blind and Married at First Sight (but NOT The Bachelor— I’ll get to that later). “What the—,” you ask. “This is not why I subscribed to the Substack of a longtime literary editor.” But stay with me. These unscripted shows have of course been edited and shaped, produced and coiffed, but more often than you might suspect, viewers get to see real people saying surprising and unique things.

We see their vulnerabilities, their desires, their fears, their weirdness. On these two shows, much of the language can of course feel stale. The Bachelor is made wholly of regurgitated language and familiar sentiments like, “I feel so lucky to be on this journey with you” or “This [twilight carriage ride][waterfall makeout sesh][private dinner with lead singer of Berlin or some other member of an 80s band] is amazing.”

But then comes Danielle on Love is Blind, Season Two, saying, “He could come out with no teeth and I'd still kiss him on the mouth." And Bennett from Married at First Sight, Season 11, with, “I've always said: Parallel parking is a surefire mark of sexual prowess.” I maintain that Bennett and Amelia are the most appealing and best couple to ever grace reality tv. I’m still sad that they didn’t last after the last show wrapped.

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Season 11 of Married at First Sight is considered the best of the series, and I agree. Set in New Orleans just before and then during the time when Covid shut down the city and the world, the show brought to viewers five couples of varying compatibility and chemistry— and ten true individuals.

From least to most compatible, we met:

1. Christina (friendly and free spirited flight attendant who may or may not have been homeless) and Henry (marble-mouthed mouse who may or may not have been a virgin).

   -Henry: “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life” - said as he jumps on a childproof trampoline.

2. Olivia (cat loving nurse practitioner) and Brett (cat loving self-proclaimed lady’s man/doofus)

   -Olivia: “What will it take for you to fall in love in this relationship?” Brett: “Sexy underwear dances.”

3. Karen (shy and skeptical) and Miles (younger and game, maybe too game for Karen)

   -“Did your Mom sign your permission slip to come on this honeymoon?” - Karen's response to Miles calling her a cougar.

4. Bennett (pedicab driver, playwright and director, builder of tiny home) and Amelia (resident, wearer of fake birds, slack-line expert)

   -Bennett: “"Just a few footsteps away, right down there, I told Amelia for the very first time that I love her."

5. Amani (calm, confident, bemused lover of dancing) and Woody (joyful, funky lover of dancing)

   -Woody: “How do you wear a burger?”

   

Other than Woody and Amani (I admit I cannot find a good quote from them but trust me when I tell you there are—still—fabulous together), the above quotes tell us a lot about who these people are. Dialogue can reveal so much about character, and offers a different tool than exposition, physical description, or the observations of other characters. But dialogue is often the last thing writers lean on in this way.

These ten newlyweds burst out of the gate wide-eyed and weird, and only grew moreso on both counts as their vibrant city quieted to a hush. They found themselves virtually locked in their apartments with this person/stranger they married just weeks earlier.

This is the recipe for great fiction: begin with character, throw in high stakes (arranged marriage), simmer, up the stakes (what’s this cough?), simmer more, crank up the stakes even more (Covid!), let the distress simmer, and then present your character with a decision. And without fresh language, awake words, the surprise of word juxtaposition, you’ve got nothing.

Authenticity in writing can come more easily with the right mindset. I’ve written about this before, but I’ll say again that when I tread a little lighter, when I allow something else to pour through my brain with some amount of trust and faith in the process, my writing is always better. If we don’t try to so hard, if we don’t become dictator-writers, if we let our characters be weird and wrong and themselves (like we must do with our children, our friends, our family), the we are all better off.

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- Elizabeth Bowen

There is no limit to how much fiction writers can get to know their characters. Free writing can be a satisfying and easy and low stakes way to help build a more visceral sense of these people who have suddenly appeared on the page. My new favorite (and highly overused) phrase with clients is “Writing is one of the least efficient things you can do.” But I think this lack of efficiency is in fact a beautiful reminder that this thing, writing, is of course more art than capitalism. Ideally. Some of us need to earn a living too, but let’s leave that thought for another time. Art exists on a different plane than efficiency.

The more you know your characters, the more you can infuse your stories or novels with precise language and truth about these people, and this is crucial in creating a unified and powerful story, whatever the genre.

If you are stuck in the woods with your fiction writing, unsure which way to go, unmotivated or just confused, chances are that you don’t know your characters well enough. Their stories should come from them, not you. If this sounds unhinged, it kind of is, but I stand by it. To my mind, the best writing comes from allowing something that is not entirely us to filter through our brains and our fingers and onto our screens.

Here are some ways to become more intimate with your characters:

1. Introduce two of them who don’t know each other. Put them together in an elevator or over coffee. Write for 10-15 minutes.

2. Write the most embarrassing moment of one character’s childhood. How do they recount this story decades later to their friends? Their spouse? Their children? Write for 20 minutes.

3. Give them a job interview. This can be written or spoken, whatever you feel like. And then pretend to give them a job reference. What would you tell their potential employer about them?

4. Have two of your characters describe each other physically. Go beyond superficial traits like hair color and height. What does each person really look like to the other? What reactions does each have to the other person’s presence? Aim for simile and metaphor here— use free association, words that wouldn’t normally describe people. Really turn off your brain.

5. Keeping your brain turned off, list 5 words to describe this characters as their parents’ child. 5 words to describe them as a partner or spouse or lover. 5 words to describe them as a parent. 5 to describe them as a friend. A pet owner. A neighbor.

Ideally, you’ll come up with a few words or concepts that unlock something about one or more of your characters, and this will lead you forward. And ideally, character compels plot.

Artists like Klimt render character with color, pattern, and loads of subjectivity, of course. The more instinctively and articulately you can express characterization, the better.

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Lately I’ve been trying to stay in a place of “information gathering.” Mostly, I’m buzzing around, freaking out about socialsecuritysciencenukestransrightsfascismracismtheenvironmentUSAIDetc. while trying to work and adult, but when possible, I’m also trying to cultivate neutral interest in what is going on. No one knows just what is to come, but I feel better when I know SOMETHING rather than nothing, and now is the time to find the people and resources who are trustworthy. I’ve been ingesting the opinions of Robert Reich, Tim Snyder, AOC, and a host of others over on Bluesky. But once I read more than a paragraph or so about the current situation, panic ensues.

Fascism wants us to panic. It does not want us to process information or think critically or imagine or create. As we’re seeing, it floods us in an attempt to disempower us. Hannah Arendt (someone I studied as an undergrad Poli. Sci major 100 years ago and someone I never thought I’d return to as a beacon in a dark time) knew that societies with the most isolated, disconnected people are the easiest prey for dictators. Technology and a pandemic and the normalizing of work-from-home and income inequality (or the increasing difficulty of earning a living while the few hoard capital) and racism and who knows what else have conspired to fracture Americans as a unified group.

Arendt wrote:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

British critic and theorist Robert Eaglestone said:

When people are atomized, a movement or a strongman arises and he offers a story or an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy. This story becomes more and more powerful. You can’t argue with people who become Nazis or Stalinists because there’s only one way to think.

Fascism uses storytelling to establish one easily understood narrative that blames and dehumanizes and “other-izes” its opponents. Immigrants are stealing our jobs; they are raping women and selling drugs and overtaking our country (and eating the cats and the dogs). Trans people are dangerous to girls and women and children, preying on traditional gender roles and upending the patriarchy. If you don’t personally know any immigrants or trans people (or Jews or Blacks, etc.) and your only exposure to them is online; if you have spent your life working your butt off and still can’t make ends meet; if you haven’t been able to afford college; if you’ve felt rejected by the women you’ve been attracted to your whole life; if you’ve watched people of color rise faster than you have, you are prone to believing this story.

Clearly we need to be listening to and telling other stories.

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How, as humans and writers who don’t buy into the above story, do we make any kind of impact and not drown in the flood? Here are some ideas:

1. Use original and truthful words. It’s tempting to join linguistic bandwagons. It’s tempting to reduce sexism to #MeToo and racism to #BlackLivesMatter, but neither sexism nor racism is that simple. Clearly #MeToo and #BLM have been and are crucial and game-changing, but sexism and racism (and income inequality and ableism and zenophobia) remain and we need to continue to tell our own stories of these cancers in new ways. And to read and listen to others. Nuance matters. The best fiction and memoir is not overly simplistic. It’s complex, and real, and surprising. It’s funny and weird and specific. The English language is a massive palette.

   A good source of inspiration for me has been poetry. The Academy of American Poets sponsors Poem-a-Day. Art and new kinds of food and certain Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and my kids’ takes on the world and indie movies and staring at wildlife in my backyard (we have otters!) and museums also help.

   2. And write about true things. This means leaving the screens and the house and being with other people. Experiencing things IRL. Believing that truth is still a thing. Believe your eyes, even when other people tell you not to. Especially when other people tell you not to.

   3. Move beyond the story of Good vs. Bad. No real person is just good or bad (although, lord, I can think of quite a few that qualify for the latter right now). We live in an attention economy. Online platforms, media, marketers, etc. compete for our most valuable asset, which is our attention. They seek to engage us immediately and emotionally, and then pound us with the same quick message again and again. Immigrants are evil. Trans people are evil. DEI is evil. They are bad. We are good. They are bad. We are good.

   As writers, we owe it to ourselves and our country to tell more complicated stories. Yes, we are up against very limited attention spans on the part of our readers, but we can hook them with the truth, with empathy and nuance and surprise and humor. Try to inject your antagonists with some redeeming qualities. Give your protagonists flaws. Big ones.

   4. Don’t forget to write about people being together in the same room. And being different from each other. And kind to each other. And unkind. Sometimes it’s easy to forget to write scenes and to stay interior or expository, to leap through time or skip from place to place. Between tech and the rapid onset of fascism, our brains are overcaffeinated right now. Slow down sometimes and let your characters or people (if you are writing nonfiction) just be together.

   5. Write longhand. Or subscribe to an app like Freedom that will block access to everything but your work on your computer. In other words, try to make writing about writing again, and not further fuse you to your screen and all of the information that comes through this portal.

   6. Avoid AI when writing, as well as overgoogling. I am guilty of the latter. But I also have memories of doing research for 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories at the Houghton Library at Harvard, archives that held decades of editorial correspondence between editors and authors like Hemingway, John Updike, Richard Wright, and so many others. (Richard Ford’s was the most surprising, but that’s all I will say.) Sitting at that table alone in this drafty room, flipping through heavy folders of typewritten letters and forms from decades earlier, coming to understand with amusement and awe that editorial departments were just as impassioned and squabbling back then as they are today, that the author I would have thought would be a diva was in fact deeply kind (at least in this letter), while another was an impatient turd was not an experience I could have had online.

   Of course, it’s not possible to research everything in person, but if you can, it’s worthwhile to try to go places and talk to people, hold objects, feel things in your body.

   I’ll leave off with a poem by Ada Limón, the US Poet Laureate.

   Instructions on Not Giving Up

   More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
   of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
   almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
   their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
   sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
   that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
   and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
   the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
   the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
   growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
   to the strange idea of continuous living despite
   the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
   I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
   unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

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Here we go again, this time far worse than before. Dear Leader and his people are flooding the zone and Project 2025 is, unsurprisingly, his rulebook.

How to write? How to do anything that requires focus and creativity, which is a function of calm and hope, to some extent?

Below are seven (more) tips to keep writing even it seems futile or impossible. Some of these tips can apply to anything, though, not just writing. It’s crucial that we hold onto joy right now. If it’s painting or music or cooking or even down time with your pet, just substitute that for writing below.

1. Get up a little earlier and squeeze it in before everything else, before the kids wake, before you check the news. Tap into that rare moment we get every day when things are new and promising. Start small if need be—half an hour, an hour. Every moment matters.

2. Meet a writing friend at a cafe or a library for a few hours and vow not to socialize, only to help each other stay focused. Or meet at each other’s houses, or wherever you need to be that feels like a break from your routine go-to place.

3. Play with it. Take a break from that scene you don’t want to write or that research you’ve been putting off and give yourself a fun and random prompt, like: What does Character A eat for breakfast? What makes Character B the most irritated and why? For memoir, what would you never include, ever ever? Just write for 10-15-20 minutes. This will give your mind a break from the higher pressure writing.

4. Instead of asking your person or friend to read something, get together and read some of it aloud. Pay attention to their reactions. Even if they wince. (Especially if they wince.) Often the face and body reveal more than kind and tactful criticism. Be sure to bring something to eat or drink as a thank you to this person.

5. If you’re feeling too despondent even to put fingers to keyboard, find a favorite passage and write it out longhand. Rinse and repeat until you feel the need to write your own words again.

6. Reading is writing, to my mind. If reading seems hard right now (who can focus?), make it an experience. Take your favorite (physical) book into the bath. Or bring your favorite blanket to the couch. Light a candle. Put on slippers. Open book.

7. Go somewhere new to write on your own. A library you’ve never visited. A cafe you’ve wanted to try. A different town. I once went to the library in Concord, my hometown, and granted, this is one gem of a historical place, just the switch in location itself had me glued to that desk.

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   And here are seven (more) mental health tips for writers and others right now. Please forgive this weird formatting that I cannot seem to fix:

   1. Dose the news, but don’t check out altogether. We need all hands on deck.

   2. Rest. Nap when need be. Eat the chocolate, diet tomorrow. Or don’t diet.

   3. Get something on the calendar for this weekend with someone you’ve been meaning to see or someone you haven’t seen in a while.

   4. Find some mindless/mindful activity like word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, knitting, anything not on the computer to help you numb out offline. Keep a few of these handy for rough moments.

   5. Find hopeful news like this or this about the resistance, and spread it far and wide.

   6. Do one small thing that is loving for yourself or someone else every day. Buy yourself a beautiful pen or a new book or new tea. Listen to songs you loved as a child. Go for a walk. Pick up the tab of that frenzied mom behind you at the coffee shop. Tell an elderly woman she is beautiful. Let two people go ahead of you when driving.

   7. Read The Onion. Watch “Career Day,” Check out The Reductress. Laugh. Share things that laugh with loved ones. (And if they don’t laugh as well, let it go. Laughter is subjective, of course.)

And here are 2 bonus points for writers and readers:

1. Bookshop.org is now selling ebooks! Support for them is support for authors and indy bookstores, something hugely important right now.

2. Adult fiction deals (books sold by agents) grew 10% last year. Ignore the haters who say that no one reads anymore.

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Your current storm may be family or work or politics or money or health, a slew of rejections on the writing front or an agent who has stopped returning your emails. It may be that you live in or near LA and if you do, my whole heart goes out to you. Frankly, I cannot imagine a more hellish scenario. If you don’t live there and want to help, here are some organizations collecting everything from diapers to food to money to clothes.

Whatever is besieging you, you also have to get through the days, the more mundane tasks that may seem futile and/or just impossible. We all live at least two lives simultaneously— the bigger umbrella Life (as an American or a person who needs to earn more or exercise more, for example) and the life that keeps on chugging with its need to pay bills and empty the dishwasher and water the plants.

I am gifted at fretting about the big picture and (mostly unsuccessfully) strategizing ways to avoid doom. I am less talented at remaining mindful and present, keeping my gaze on the deer in my yard or the beautiful sentence I just read. “Lovely!” I think, and return to churning about the demise of democracy. As we head deeper into winter, as we read news from LA and Washington DC, now is as good a time as any to remember how and where to find psychic shelter. Here are some ideas that don’t cost a lot or are free:

IRL. I will sing this from the heavens. We need to get ourselves off our computers and back in the room with each other. Social media seems as if its being coopted by nefarious bazillionaires and possibly stuffed full of bots. We can all agree that isolation breeds depression and loneliness. So: make a plan with a family member, an adult kid, a neighbor, a dog, anyone. Have coffee together. Go for a walk. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. Chances are this will boost your mood, as well as the mood of the person (or dog) you’re with.

Make New Art. I’ve been painting again. I suck at it— and I don’t say this as a way to garner comfort or praise. I’m not good, and my cheapo paints and canvases from Joanne’s Fabrics are far from professional level, but I love it because it gets me out of my head. It feels like play, messy, mindless/mindful play. I’ve been painting on very small canvasses this week:

Free Write. Find a little used corner of your house. Find that pretty old journal someone gave you years ago that you never used. Locate your favorite pen or pencil, and then write something unconnected to your current big project, whatever that may be. Write something that you will show to no one. Give yourself 5 or 10 or 15 minutes and find a good prompt and just go.

Meditate. I signed up for Headspace again. I’ve used it once since then, but dammit, it helps.

Move Your Body. Walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Dance to a good song. Be in your body. Take a bath. Clean something. Just move.

See a Movie in a Movie Theater. I really enjoyed A Complete Unknown (partly because it reminded me of my rather hippy-ish childhood going to Pete Seeger concerts). I didn’t love Wicked as much as the rest of the world did, but who cares? Whatever the movie, I love leaving my brain behind and being in a big, dark room, eating popcorn with strangers all around.

Cook Something New. What have you always wanted to try but never got around to cooking? Sometimes the idea of cooking something new is overwhelming to me, especially if loads of time and ingredients are involved, so I’ve set aside a good recipe for baba ghanoush and will add pomegranate seeds, as I had an insanely good Lebanese restaurant recently. This seems manageable.

Go to a Museum. This is another good way to get out of your head and the storm. I’m planning to see the Kafka exhibit at the Morgan Library the next time I’m in NY for a retreat with the HPE editors (we are all going). I enjoy going to museums off-hours, when the crowds aren’t so bad. So if you can, check out what’s on near you. Go on your own or with a friend.

Strengthen your Vagus Nerve. Here’s a quick video from the Cleveland Clinic with some good and easy suggestions for keeping stress at bay. It’ll seem obvious at first, but keep watching (it’s only about 3 minutes) for some good and specific little tidbits.

What works for you? What movies, easy recipes, music, anything else help you put aside the storm and regroup?

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“All right, all right, all right.”

—David Wooderson, Dazed and Confused

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I admit that I was more than a little afraid to cede the helm of The Best American Short Stories. I was ready— after 18 years, it was time. But the idea of no longer receiving a paycheck from a publisher— after having done so for thirty years— made me queasy. And irrelevance loomed. I pictured myself like that twenty-year-old still lurking around the high school with a faint whiff of beer on his breath, waxing on about the good ole days of Alice Adams and Edith Pearlman and Tin House magazine. (I am now reminded of Jamel Brinkley’s wonderful story, “Blessed Deliverance,” which appears in BASS 2024. This is one hell of a high school lurker.) I do think that Alice and Edith’s stories and Tin House have echoed forward and will continue to do so, but I digress.

It’s been about 11 months since I ingested 10-20 short stories almost daily. In that time, I’ve devoted myself to HPE, and as an anxious person, I may have overcompensated, as I now find myself busier than I’ve ever been, juggling way, way too much. It’s a happy problem, not even a problem, really, but something to get used to. BASS entailed one task for 95% of the time: reading stories. Now, I find myself working with two other editors to balance a growing list of clients, as well as planning The Breakthrough, a new and new kind of writing retreat with Michele Wildgen (of Tin House! I swear that’s not Bud Light on my breath), commissioning short fiction and essays for a variety of online, audio, and film clients, and many other things that entail a far larger variety and speed than I’d grown accustomed to.

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Publishing thrives on a kind of prestige economy. Editors get paid in prestige, certainly not in adequate salaries (especially when one considers the cost of living in New York). There are far fewer jobs in publishing than people who want them, and the idea of publishing is worth a lot. Writing for publication is not all that different.

I seem to have stepped out of both realms recently, and again, it was frightening. People sometimes ask me what I’m writing, and I have to admit that I’m VERY loosely (read: infrequently at best) working on a memoir/writing book/nothing. The thing that I write most is this Substack newsletter. If I’m honest, I see that I don’t much want to return to what felt to me like the suffocating parameters of book publishing OR writing/publishing books, although I do want to help others do this. Maybe that is hypocritical or sadistic or something, who knows.

This is all to say that sometimes, stepping forward into the future and out of the present and past can bring fears of irrelevance, and disappointing others, earning less, seeming brash. None of us wants to be that high school lurker. I’m here to tell you that both capitalism and its attendant guard dog, conformity, conspire to keep us in our isolated holes, wanting more and never getting it. I’m here to say that it is possible to take stock of the positive and even prestigious things that one has done, thank the gods, and move forward and not only recreate oneself, but thrive on one’s own terms.

If this is irrelevance and old age, I’ll take it. I’m even letting my grays come in. I will say that I think this phase of life suits me. As does working for myself. I’m constitutionally a chicken with its head cut off, and so I’ll continue on spreading myself too thin, working directly with authors, and carving out my own strange path.

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If only the dreamy Kauai Sonesta were a leeeeetle bit closer…

The Kauai Writers Conference was a hoot as always— and it arrived at just the right time, so soon after the election. The week in beautiful Kauai was a chance to bury my head in the (smooth, soft) sand and focus on writers and writing. What an enormous gift.

I taught a class on writing short stories with Lauren Groff, another gift. I have known Lauren since 2006, when her second published short story was chosen for BASS. She herself remains just as purely artistic and brilliant as her work, and at times I felt a bit like the commerce to her art. As someone who works with a good amount of new writers, I have to keep my head at least partly in the “what and how will this sell” corner of the room. Lauren reminded me and our students—a mix of young and old and French and Australian and Texan and Californian—of the importance of language, of truth and subversion and experiment and even sometimes making your readers uncomfortable. In the end, I think we served as bookends to some important conversations about process and storytelling.

We had both been destroyed by the election, the positive biopsy results of our country. We agreed not to discuss it, and that served us well. It felt too soon to do much more than avoid the topic.

And then came the hot tub. One afternoon, Jean Kwok and I were enjoying a poolside hot tub (oh, what heaven) with a couple of random men who were there on vacation, not for the writing conference, and they and Jean got to talking about taxes. I felt it coming, but hoped for the best. Jean agreed with the men that taxes could be oppressive and spoke of her own difficulties, and I just listened. Sitting in a bathing suit in a hot tub with strangers is, of course, an exercise in vulnerability. Something inside me grew hard and still as they continued to talk. One man admitted sheepishly that he’d voted for Donald. Clearly the man seemed to infer that Jean and I had voted differently than he had. He immediately began issuing justifications— the economy, the economy, taxes, the economy, plus he was from California and knew the real Kamala, who was just so LEFTY. Before I could stop myself, I said sort of flatly, “I feel for you. You were wrong. This will not help you economically. You’ll see.” I briefly explained tariffs and oligarchies, that a better choice would have been to tax billionaires and Amazon and the like. The friend of the first man nodded vigorously, agreeing. They seemed eager to find common ground. The first man listened and then went on about Kamala, repeating his points, and I thought he seemed to want validation. But fuck if I was going to give them that. As he spoke, I just looked at him. I was too closed inside to do more. He kept trying to get me to understand. I just listened and didn’t do any more. He verbally squirmed. And then he got up and left the hot tub. And then so did his friends.

Was this a win compared to the results of election night? (Don’t answer that.) Did this feel like a win in my book? Yes, if only in the sense that I did not erupt from the hot tub in my skirted granny bathing suit and wrap my pruned hands around the chatty man’s neck. It was also a win in that it showed me my own potential for restraint and calm, two things I did little to cultivate during his last presidency. Will this last? Who knows, but restraint sure felt like a kind of power, and I’ll take that right now.

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We all need to find our power and not just post-election. Life is hard, dammit, and if all we can do is sit quietly or eat just one and not two tubs of ice cream or find one small way to focus on—better yet, to help those we love, then something is going right. We have to steer our ships in whatever way we can in the moment.

Otherwise in Kauai, I chatted with so many attendees about the business and the process (the former less than the latter), went for a gorgeous long walk with Lauren and Allison Fairbrother of Riverhead Books followed by Japanese Shave Ice (which is fluffy as snow and made us all want to order a Japanese Shave Ice Machine); explored endangered birds with Tom Perrotta and Mary Granfield, played a rowdy game of Celebrity with a room full of writing celebrities (Jess Walter, Meg Wolitzer—the best Charades player I have ever encountered, Christina Baker Kline, Ruth Ware, and many others), stared at the palm trees, drifted in the pool, talked to more writers, and generally felt insanely lucky to be there and to still be a part of this business so many decades after I entered it.

Wishing you all peaceful Thanksgivings free of news, painful disagreements, and whatever else weighs on you these days. Be well, people.

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