Day 12 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you desperately need to share your vision of the world.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you desperately need to share your vision of the world. Joyful or damaged, optimistic or bittersweet. Holy crap, the world is insane right now! And this is a positive way to process your life, and the information you’re receiving. With your words. Look, I don’t have all (or even any?) of the answers. But this is one way we can proceed. By writing it down. One thousand words at a time. We start there, so we can figure out what’s next.

Some housekeeping: I want to give all you folks in the slack a heads up that it will stay open till June 30, and then it will be closed for the next year. The reason why the slack must close is simple: I must move on to my other work. Gotta pay the bills, my friends! But two weeks will hopefully give you enough time to connect with other people, maybe start a slack of your own together, or perhaps do another round of writing to keep the momentum going. If you’re on a roll, don’t stop, because rolls don’t come around all the time. Respect the momentum.

I’m a big fan of Angela Flournoy as a person and as a writer, and these two things seem fluid in my mind. They way she can synthesize big ideas with a sense of humanity and decency has always impressed me. (Witness this stunning profile of Mickalene Thomas.) She’s direct and unafraid and also empathetic and also just wildly fucking talented. The Turner House was a dazzling debut, both a finalist for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She has written for The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Her long-awaited follow-up is The Wilderness, which I repeatedly have begged for a galley of to no avail. (Let this serve as another request, Mariner Books.) It just got a starred review from Publishers Weekly (they called it a “knockout”), and you can pre-order it here. She is also great on instagram, and I particularly enjoyed this post about her and our contributor from earlier this week, Jade Chang. Go give her a follow and watch her succeed this year.

Angela has asked her donation go to PCRF¹. Today she’s talking about the value of writing together.

“For a long time, I thought I couldn’t do writing groups. Not because I was snobby about it, but because I was shy about my work in progress, superstitious, even, as if saying aloud what I was currently preoccupied with (or, more often struggling with) would jinx the whole endeavor. Then I had a baby during the early days of the pandemic, and spent many hours inside, keeping a small child alive, and not reading or writing much of anything. I became desperate to talk to smart people outside of my household—about anything at all, but especially about the novel I hoped to get back to writing. I did something I’d never done in my writing life before, which was to tell some writers I knew that I’d join them in person. I spent the next two years meeting with the same four people, day in and day out, to write fiction alongside each other at a café in Los Angeles.

We did not share drafts, but we wrote, and we ate. During the meal breaks we’d talk, about our works in progress, especially the technical problems we were struggling with (‘how do people even kiss for the first time?’ I remember sincerely asking one day), and also about our lives. The art we loved, the weird dreams we’d had, the crappy TV shows we stayed up too late watching. I’d always been a coffeeshop writer, but I had never before allowed myself the vulnerability of companionship in the endeavor. It shifted something for me. I still took my writing seriously, but I became less precious about what I needed to get words on the page. Turns out I could do it sitting across from someone at a table, as long as they didn’t speak until the agreed-upon speaking time, and that I even liked doing it that way. At that stage in my life, what I needed more than solitude was friends, like-minded people who loved to chat but who also wanted to end each day with a scene written, a chapter charted out.

My new interest in talking about my writing also spurred me to approach listening anew. Not just at the cafe, but everywhere. An old friend from a residency who loves classical music talked my ear off about Bach over dinner one night, and I happily drank up his knowledge, for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing him so thrilled to share it. One offhand detail was weird enough that I pulled out my phone as he spoke and typed a quick note to myself. A year later, that detail, about whether or not is ‘about’ anything, found its way into an important scene in my book. If you are open with other people, if you let them in a little bit on what has been knocking around in your brain, they might just do the same, and what they share might be the key to a door you hadn’t even known you needed to open.

I finished The Wilderness, the novel I’d been working on at that café, in early 2024, and shortly thereafter I moved back to New York. It’s just me again, at the coffee shop and at my humble desk, but I still hold those hours and hours of conversation in my head. I now know that my own writing life can be flexible, that I can get it done whenever and however, and that if I need to phone a friend to bounce around an idea, or even make a brand-new friend with that hope for writing companionship somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s no shame in that, either.”

Here's to solid writing companionship.

Good luck today,

Jami

1. I don’t know if we’ve ever had three people choose the same charity before, but it’s a good indication of what’s on a lot of people’s minds.