1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 13

A letter from Colson Whitehead.

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Hi friends.

Go Knicks!

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you have whatever the writer’s version is of a marathon runner’s high. You have been writing for days and days by now, listening to a particular soundtrack perhaps that keeps you going, or thriving off the imagined roar of the crowd awaiting your words. Perhaps you are just inspired by keeping pace with all these other determined people around you. You are in it. You are almost there. You will drag yourself ever closer to the end of the finish line of this project. Because you are in the zone, focused and determined. You are locked in. To those 1000 words.

Day 13. Can you believe it? Will you miss it? I always do, a little bit. So I was really glad when today’s letter showed up in my inbox. Because it’s how to deal with what happens next.

And I’m especially excited about who wrote the letter. I’ve been trying to get Colson Whitehead to contribute a letter for years. It’s OK, I understand: He’s been busy winning Pulitzers and National Book Awards and having groundbreaking TV shows and Oscar-nominated movies made out of his books.

He’s a genius novelist, this guy, but also he’s funny as hell—thank God for the funny writers. And some of his non-fiction pieces were extremely formative to me over the years, really part of my life as a New Yorker when I lived there, but also as I carved out who I was as a writer and a person. I still think about the comfort I took in this essay he wrote after 9-11. And even most recently his take on A.I. and creativity in the NYT landed squarely in my head and heart.

Cool Machine, Whitehead’s tenth novel and the conclusion to his “Harlem Trilogy,” will be published on July 21. Kirkus, in a starred review, called him, “A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.”

His charitable donation will be going to the beloved Center for Fiction. Today he talks to us about how to keep going when this is all over.