1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 12
Because you love words.
Hi friends.
Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are deeply, passionately, obsessively in love with the written word. To write is an expression of love for you. When you sit down to write today (and every day) it is not just because you believe in yourself and the story you have to tell, it is because this is genuinely your idea of a good time. Even when it is hard—and it is often hard, I know, believe me—there is still an underlying pleasure to it all. Because you are spending time with your words. This is a gift you’re giving yourself. I hope you can see that by now.
Some housekeeping:
We finish this project on Friday. The slack will stay open till the end of June for those of you who started late or who want to keep going for a little bit longer.
The e-book version of the 1000 Words book will be on sale through the end of the month if you haven’t read it yet.
We have fresh merch designed in fun new colors by Brooke Pickett.
If you haven’t donated yet, there is still time today and tomorrow to help support all these wonderful charities. Subscribe, venmo or read more about it here. Look, we’ve already saved a dog’s life!
Today’s contributing writer is the award-winning multidisciplinary artist and writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. She was someone who I stumbled upon online during the pandemic. I ordered and instantly loved a copy of her hybrid poetry-photography collection, Seeing the Body. Something about it was so utterly familiar to me, and in fact something about it reminded me of the idea of home. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but when I read this book I felt myself slide into a real feeling of intimacy and familiarity with her. I suppose her writing just invites the reader in. That is a powerful gift.
And she has been busy with it. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in other journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The Paris Review and The New York Times. (Here is a beautiful poem of hers published this spring in The New Yorker.) Her third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear won the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and her debut novel, Promise was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year.
And this year, her debut memoir, The Flower Bearers was published to much acclaim. A starred review from Kirkus said, “This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing.”
She has asked that her donation go to Asiyah Women’s Center and today she talks to us about confidence.
“I used to write letters to myself. Inspired by the epistolary tradition that Rilke once used to address a young poet or that James Baldwin used to speak to his beloved nephew, I once addressed a younger version of myself the way I’d address anyone I cared for deeply and whose life I sought to protect, cherish, and save.
These weren’t journal entries. They were bona fide letters that I’d slip into self-addressed envelopes sometimes including pressed flowers, receipts, news clippings, obituaries, and often, rejection letters. Carefully, I’d seal the flap with my spit before placing them somewhere deep in a desk drawer.
Whenever I’ve come across one of these envelopes while opening a storage box or old book, I’m shocked. I’m holding what feels like a time capsule, a love letter, a rare fossil, an obituary of a former self I once was.
The letters offer me an opportunity to meet myself in a way that is terrifying and gorgeous. I’m astonished at the infinitesimal ways I judged and flayed myself about my writing. It’s not the way I’d criticize anyone else. My self-judgment was rarely balanced with praise. But what was visible, what is most clear to me is that nothing else has really mattered to me except my relationship with writing and art.
I was a girl who had a lot of guts and talent but was also a traumatic mess. Some of the advice this younger writer offered herself was useless, absurd. Some of it was both critical and generous. Despite external advice that was often dissonant, I’d cobbled together a Frankenstein of contrary wisdoms. No wonder I was often confused, depressed, exhilarated, and afraid. Still, I was doggedly possessed by Hope.
I’ve stared down at the rejection letters that often padded those envelopes. Twenty years later, I recognize that the younger version of me, engulfed by tears and small triumphs, wasn’t going to give up. Smiling now at my bold handwriting on a receipt for paying rent I could barely make some months, my eyes sting. For me, true homelessness was a life devoid of writing and creating. Storytelling is the roof above my head and the earth beneath my feet.
‘Is this any good?’ That doesn’t matter at first and won’t for a long time. Don’t even think about asking that kind of lazy, self-sabotaging question until you’ve reached the end of a first draft. Thank goodness writing is mostly non-linear. In revisions, editing, etc., you can return and return, casting your writing into those flames until you’re satisfied. Engage judgement and vigorous craft on the terms that will first allow you to actually finish and complete whatever writing you’ve begun. Beware that there may or may not ever be a final version of the story. After, ‘final versions’ of anything rarely happen, even with death.
Writing must happen because we’re willing to risk everything. If we don’t risk ourselves then we will suffer in the gallows of security and silence. And there’s enough damn suffering in this world. We writers know it very well.
So how we do we live?
Get yourself into a doable practice that you can live with that doesn’t antagonize your inner life and accommodates the shifting demands of duties and obligations we must all manage. Don’t force yourself ‘to choose’ between writing and living. Never separate intuition and intelligence. Organize your outer life so that you don’t shrink the time you need for your writing because there’s something else you think you must do before you can meet yourself on that page.
Let everyone in your life who needs to know understand that your writing is an essential organ that functions the way your heart and lungs give you breath and life. More than food, let yourself be hungry for writing and reading. Feed yourself at all times with books, going beyond your favorites to try new things. Unlike other things we consume, language is intact, non-perishable, and delicious. Appreciate that our complicated palate for storytelling is a calling.
Gather your receipts, your love letters, your What-Ifs, as proof that you’ve shown up. Be present now. Lose yourself in the timeless waves of your perceptions. Then let us find you in your discoveries and revelations.
We need you to live your story so speak it clearly in your own, inimitable voice. This is how you will meet yourself. It is how we each will have the privilege of keeping our humanity interesting, bearable, beautiful, and more human.”
Live your story today,
Jami
Where to begin? Again, the prompt has special meaning for me. The project I've devoted this #1000words challenge to is writing about a younger self that I've reacquainted myself with in a package of letters I wrote from 1989-1992. I sent these letters to my best friend, who had picked up and moved from NYC to France; it was an abrupt move, and we hadn't taken care of our emotional selves beforehand (and, it seems, after). She sent me the package some months ago, and I knew there was a person herein I needed to (re-)discover. In the first letters, handwritten late at night on onion-skin paper, I describe a domestic life with a husband and 4-year-old son; I'm also pregnant, writing a book, and doing freelance editing. Throughout the entire period, I opine about "my writing" as a place I want to get back to--yet the letters reveal that I was living that writing life. Now, 36 years later, I've reached a far different place as a writer. The routines Rachel speaks of have been the foundation I've needed to write and revise my novel. Challenges like these provide a shot of adrenaline and self-reflection that add sheen to the day.
“Don’t force yourself ‘to choose’ between writing and living.” Well, this brought me up short. Because I’ve long believed — and often advised students —that if you can live without writing, go do that and by implication I was saying that writers don’t really live, we write about living. Or — we write instead of living. Now I’m questioning my own facile statement. I write and I live, but I do think writers spend a lot of time with our noses pressed to the glass, so intent on describing life that we don’t always live it. There’s a line from Funny Girl in which Nick Arnstein is asked what he does and he says, IIRC, “I live” and he’s challenged: Doesn’t everyone do that? On the contrary, he says, or words to that effect: Almost no one does. So maybe the platonic ideal is to be a writer with a life and depending on the day, I could argue either way if I actually have a life. Anyway, words done! I’m at 15.6k, but I believe it’s important (for me) to show up every day for 14 days.