1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 7

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because no one is going to stop you, no kids, no partner, no boss. You are in control of your voice, your focus, your discipline, your ideas. You are in command here. And you will fight your way all the way to the end of these beautiful 1000 words.

Welcome to the halfway mark—did you think you were going to make it this far? After today, you will have 7000 words, or whatever 7 days of good work results in for you. I want you think about what that means to you and where you were a week ago and what thinking about your work every day for a week has accomplished. And I hope you know this means you absolutely have to finish now. I know you can. I believe in you.

Today’s contributor is a dazzling writer, the freshest of voices: Joseph Earl Thomas. I feel sort of silly saying something so simple about a whole, accomplished artist, academic, educator, human being as he is, but dammit I simply just love his work so much. He’s truly gifted. Every time I read his words they lift off the page for me. I’m just a big old fan over here.

His debut was the inventive memoir Sink, which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, followed by the stunning and hilarious novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, which won him the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His prose and poetry has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review (on vasectomies and Pokémon!), and The Verge, amongst others, and I highly recommend this recent story of his in McSweeney’s, too. (And the entire issue overall while we’re at it.) He is also a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

He has a short story collection coming out in July called Leviathan Beach which you should absolutely pre-order. Today he’s asking his donation go to Playgrounds for Palestine and he’s talking to us about writing into the kind of terror that can also be a thrill.