1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 6

A letter from Larissa Pham.

If you are just joining us, here is the FAQ.

Also this is a fundraiser for a number of charitable organizations including sponsoring a Scholastic Book Fair for a New Orleans school. Subscribe, venmo or read more about it here.

---

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you have always wanted to be a writer. You have always felt it was possible for you, were occupied with the idea of it, fascinated with this vision of yourself, doing this wonderful, exhilarating thing. You have wanted this for so long you don’t even know what you would look like without this dream. You don’t want to know! You just want to be you, dreaming, writing these 1000 words.

Today’s letter comes from Larissa Pham. I’ve never met her, I only admire her work from afar, starting with her collection of essays on art and intimacy, Pop Song. Her writing—covering such topics as gender, race, sex, and visual culture— has appeared all over the place, in The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, Aperture, Bookforum, Art in America and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor of Writing at the New School, she is one smart person.

But it was her novel, Discipline, I fell in love with most of all. I don’t always have the time to blurb, but here was one of those rare moments an editor I didn’t know asked me to blurb a stranger and I was available and game. The novel was a true portrait of a troubled artist, a favorite topic for me. (“A delicate, wry, taut, suspenseful reading experience,” is what I said, but you can read a great, thoughtful review of it here.) It was one of my favorite debut novels in recent memory, and I was happy to have her contribute this year.

Her donation goes to the American Friends Service Committee, and today she talks to us about writing just like yourself.