Day 13 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. I say this every year, but we have to write these words for the people who can’t. Do it for the people who do not have the same autonomy as you, or access to the same resources or luxuries—even if that luxury is simply just a little bit of time. Do it to honor those who wish they could write but are not allowed. Do it to honor the idea of freedom. You are lucky you have it. Now use it.

Today I wrote in my journal:

I have decided my number one piece of writing advice is stay hydrated. Which is to say: drink lots of water. But also to say: stay nourished, stay fluid, stay flexible, replenish yourself when you need it.  Give yourself what you need to sustain a level of creative activity in a focused and healthy way.

What do you need to stay hydrated?

Today’s contributing writer is

Catherine Lacey

. I met her many years ago when she was still writing her first book, and she was just this interesting, curious, and bright young person who was part of a collectively owned bed and breakfast in Brooklyn. New York! I thought. You meet all the best people here.

She also sometimes interviewed authors and photographed where they lived for a now defunct magazine. One day, she came over and interviewed me and we had a good little chat. She took some nice pictures of my apartment that afternoon. Later, I asked her for copies of those pictures to help advertise my home for sublet, because I was broke at that moment and couldn’t afford to live in New York for a while.

When she finally sold her first book, Nobody is Ever Missing, and it came out a few years later I loved it so much. (I meet people all the time who are still obsessed with that book—are you?) By then I could afford to live in New York again. I used to host a reading series in my apartment and when the book was published I invited her to read at it, and that night she read my exact favorite section from it.

I remember feeling a deep sense of satisfaction as she read. It felt like the things were happening as they should. She was supposed to write this brilliant book, and I was supposed to stand there in a crowd and watch her read from it. Maybe the world was going to be OK if people did the work and then were able to grow and become the next, wonderful versions of themselves. To be even a far-off witness to these things felt stabilizing in a specific way.

Catherine has since gone on to write more books: Pew, The Answers, and Certain American States. Her honors include the Brooklyn Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her most recent book is the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed, award-winning Biography of X, which The New York Times called, “a major novel.”

It is now available in paperback, signed copies of which can be purchased via Exile in Bookville. She has asked that her donation go to Anera. Today she talks to us about the point of writing:

"Nearly all the malaise in a writer's life can be countered with a single idea— It's not about you. 
Literature is a common good.  
Human beings have been finding and offering refuge in narrative for as long as we've been human. 
Children ask to be told stories and want to tell their own stories almost immediately. 
When we write, we are attempting to contribute to this commonly-held resource of stories. 
The only way you are able to do this is because others have told you stories. 
You have been washed in the churning waters of narrative over and over again and it is only through that contact with all that language that you are able to write anything at all. 
And while it is true your particular consciousness is yours alone and no one has lived exactly the life or held exactly the ideas that you hold, the differences between us are negligible. 
We tell similar stories, arguably the same stories, over and over. 
Let this be a relief. 
When you share your work with others you are only circulating the ideas and pieces of language that have reached you. It is nothing more than that, which is nothing less than sacred, nothing less than absolute magic. 
The point of writing and reading is communion with others.
It's not about you. "

What is the point of writing for you? A fun question to ask as we finish these last two day.

Good luck.

Jami

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