Day 14 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you believe in art and life and inspiration and the possibility and importance of catharsis and closure and all that can come through the written word, and that if you just keep going a little bit longer, just 1000 more words today, then you are there, you are done, you will have done it, you will arrive somewhere new.

You are here, you are done, you did it. You have completed this project. And I am proud of you.

A few notes:

-I am thrilled to tell you that we have crossed the threshold of the fundraising goal—more than $25,000 to go toward all the charities that have been mentioned these past two weeks and to sponsor the Scholastic Book Fair for an entire school in New Orleans. I promise to update you on the final tallies in the next email. Thank you so, so much to everyone who has donated.

-I am going on vacation from this newsletter and will be back by the end of the month.

-The slack will close on June 30 for the year.

-I am leaving comments open today in case you want to share your final word count.

-I hope you have enjoyed all the words of encouragement these past two weeks. A lot of work went into it. If you would like to support any of the authors or me personally, please buy our books! It would mean the world to me if you pre-ordered my forthcoming novel, A Reason to See You Again, which comes out in September. And if you order it from Books are Magic, I will personalize your copy and also you will get some fun stickers. I also have nine other books.

We shall end this year with a letter from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, educator, and style icon Jericho Brown. He received the Pulitzer (and was also a finalist for the National Book Award) for this third book, The Tradition, an absolutely magnificent, moving, highly crafted collection of poetry. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts and he has also won the American Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and you know what? Give him all the fellowships! Give him all the awards! He deserves them.

An associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University, he is also the author of the collections Please and The New Testament. Last year he published How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, a wonderful collection of thoughts on writing from more than 30 acclaimed Black writers, which Publishers Weekly called, "A must-read treasure trove of practical wisdom for Black writers, writing teachers, and anyone interested in the craft."

I have met a lot of people along the way who have great Jericho Brown stories, which is what happens when you’re a legend. Mine is not that great. It was just that I saw him give a reading once at the right time in my life.

I was just coming out of something. Felt unsteady about my own work. I saw him read and I thought: Oh, that’s how you do it, there’s the art again. He is exceptional at presenting his work, inviting us in to his world and way of thinking, but also forcing us to interrogate ourselves, too. How do you make people feel welcomed by your art but still challenged at the same time? Jericho Brown knows better than the rest of us. How much did I need that reading by him? A lot.

He has chosen The Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta for his donation, and you can buy any of his books anywhere. Here he is on the thrill of writing:

“My favorite part is not knowing whether anything I write will have any reader at all, especially after I’m dead.  I always tell my students there are only two modes of being under which one should take on our vocation. We must write as if we know we’ll never win any awards for it, or we must write as if we’ve already won all the awards for it.  Working under either of these states of mind allows for making a literature that is most original and most necessary since it is born out of imagining language’s possibilities rather than imagining one’s own impact on other people. I mean that if the goal is to impress anyone then meeting the goal won’t mean making the best work I could possibly make. Writing has to be something I do because I have to do it and something I perfect because it must be perfected. Readership and awards may or may not come from that. More pointedly, if readership and awards come from that, then we have what the good folks of Louisiana call lagniappe. If no readership or awards come, then I don’t even notice because I understood all along that I wouldn’t get them or that I already had all of them. The thrill is always the act of writing itself.  If doing it feels good, if doing it feels like the right—as in moral or ethical or just—thing to do, then I have already reached the ultimate goal.  

 None of that is to suggest that every writing day feels good. The endeavor itself feels good, but it’s called an endeavor because every success in the universe is the result of several failures.  If you have a meal you cook so well that when I taste it I want to ask for your hand in marriage, then I’m eating a meal that didn’t taste this good back when you first tried to make it.  So many of us had our parents praying for their lives as they were teaching us to drive. That same so many of us can now put on makeup and feed kids while driving.  I have learned to look forward to the poems that fail because I know they lead to the few that succeed. 

I am also looking forward to vulnerability.  My writing may be the only opportunity I have to be tender in a world that asks us to be strong and fierce, ask us to show ourselves as survivors without lamenting that we shouldn’t have had to survive all that we did.  Intimacy is not necessarily the order of the day in this war-torn world.  But intimacy is always necessary for the joy of reading and the thrill of writing.”

Until next year.

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.