Day 13 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you don't want to waste your time.

If you’re in New Orleans tonight, June 12, I’ll be interviewing Megan Giddings about her mesmerizing new novel Meet Me at the Crossroads at our beloved Baldwin & Co. Come say hi!

---

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you don’t want to waste your time. Life is fucking short. And in this world, we’ve got a lot of distractions. There’s a lot of shiny lights out there to entertain or dazzle or divert our brain. (And even, sometimes, to simply dull it.) But often enough they’re a waste of our time, energy and money. They’re just filler. But writing isn’t. Reading isn’t. The process isn’t. Generating something new creatively is always worth what you put into it. Even the mistakes you make, they’re worth it. Because once you get them out of the way you’ll find your way to the right 1000 words.

Day 13. I bet you didn’t think you’d make it through, right? And yet here you are. Nearly done. I’m proud of you. Now, head down. Let’s get through this. Let’s finish this.

I’ve never met today’s contributor, Aria Aber, but god I loved her debut novel, Good Girl. So did lots of other people. Here’s a glorious rave review of it in The New York Times Book from the wildly talented R.O. Kwon, while one of last year’s contributors to 1000 Words, superstar Kaveh Akbar, called it a “A no-bullsh*t, must-read debut.” And it was recently shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction. I was possessed by this book while I read it and recommended it to so many people I know. I’m glad we have her with us today.

Aria was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She is also an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont.

Aria has asked that her contributions be split between Dahnoun Mutual Aid and the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA.) Here’s Aria on reading the world.

“For over a year, I couldn’t write anything. Usually, my way out of this creative impasse is to read as much as possible until something—a line, an image, a scene—stirs up the dirt in my mind and inspires me to pick up the pen again. But even reading, this most favored and sacred activity, seemed impossible while being inundated with the footage of the genocide in Gaza. Instead, I scrolled through news updates on social media, on Al Jazeera, on Democracy Now!. Those texts and images and interview snippets, of dead or injured children and women and men and journalists, of exiled artists, made up the world of my consciousness for the last eighteen months. I felt a grief so powerful it scorched down the possibilities of language, which couldn’t even begin to describe the atrocities.

I eventually found solace in old films, such as Heiny Sour’s Leila and the Wolves, or the photographs of Myriam Boulos, the poetry of Solmaz Sharif, and the letters of Etel Adnan, whose work seemed to speak to me from the soil of history: resistance is ancient, and it will continue. Writers and artists can be a part of it. Literature can be a part of it. I needed to remind myself of this fact.

And then I encountered the article ‘Proof of Existence’ in the New York War Crimes on letters penned in the hospitals of Gaza, which you can read here. This article ruptured me the way the best poems do—I felt it taking the top of my head off, returning to me the most elemental essence of the written word. A text is a monument, a text can be a witness of a life, evidence that a human was here on earth. ‘Don’t you love words! Evidence! Don’t you love evidence!,’ the writer states. ‘Here is the evidence of those who lived and died. It’s your turn to remember.’

Over the last month, after having been on tour for my novel that was published in January, I began reading literature that’s not directly related to the Middle East again––though of course, to me, almost every word leads back to that part of the world. I read Deborah Levy’s August Blue in one sitting. Then I read Swimming Home and Hot Milk and The Man Who Sees Everything and Things I Don’t Want to Know. Levy’s work, especially, has a way of weaving the ruins of war and exile into the fabric of daily life in the West––the Holocaust, Apartheid in South Africa, the surveillance apparatus of the GDR, wars in Arab countries. She writes like a poet: her language conjures a concentrated atmosphere, so many details that concretize the action, I feel catapulted into the Mediterranean. Athens and Spain and the South of France. I see the streets of Nice, I see the dark shrubbery and motorcycles and the red hair of Kitty Finch, who dreams of writing a poem about the poppy fields in Pakistan. I think of the poppy fields in Afghanistan, the dry air.

Then I read Mohammed Malas’s The Dream: Diary of A Film, in which he chronicles the making of his homonymous 1987 documentary on the dreams of Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps. I read Don DeLillo’s ironic and prescient 1991 novel Mao II, which discusses the similarities between novelists and terrorists. I am hungry to write, I cannot sleep, and now I know that I cannot stare at my phone because the phone is full of news of the dead. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the killing of Syrians, the expulsions of Afghans from Pakistan, the frailties of borders everywhere. When will I ever write poetry again? What is a story? The associations that predicate poetry, the music of my mind, the hopefulness, this desire to be in love with the world, have all faded. I am no longer in love with the world. I am yearning to construct a different reality, to imagine a better future, to gain hope.

In order to do this, I read about the past. I read about the history of Afghanistan, the way I did when I was writing my first book. I am trying to learn from the people who came before me, who didn’t know what their tomorrows would bring and who still showed up in some way. I started keeping a journal, something I hadn’t really done before. I catalogue my impressions and my rage. I write down what I see in the media, in my recurring nightmares of orphaned children in ruined streets, what I experience at protests, at student encampments or in bars while we discuss the news. I write down memories from my first trip to Kabul, in 2019, when the country was still under US occupation. I had expected to see soldiers and tanks everywhere, and yes, the city was bombed back into the stone age, but the civilians were eating lunch, buying jewelry, begging for money, singing at concerts, and getting married. Life continues even among what Ghassan Kanafani calls the ‘debris of defeat.’

Re-reading those entries now, I understand I am keeping a record of what is happening to my inner world while the masks of the empire begin to crumble away. Maybe that’s all we can hope for when we write: to witness what happens around and within us. To diagnose, to examine the contradictions between our hopes and the ruins of our reality, the language, the chaos, the noise, the wounds of imperial violence, the grief, and the senseless deaths. This world you live in does not want you to be silent or quiet or still enough to listen to the voice inside of you, the voice that asks you what it means to be a human on earth. As a writer, you must do everything to resist the destruction of this question––out of it grows your soul, your hope, your imagination. You must read the world.”

We are almost to the other side. Thanks for being here.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.