Day 2 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

Yes, you can start today, and still catch up. Day 1 is here.

This is a fundraiser so if you’re able, please subscribe.

There is a FAQ which will hopefully answer all your questions about this project.

There is a companion book and it is wonderful and helpful.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because—let’s get down into it—you have real goals, dreams, a specific thing you’re trying to accomplish here, even if it’s just seeing if you can. Can what? Show up, finish something, imagine something a little bit every day and bring it to life by writing it down. Here you are—here we are—and it’s time to take it seriously and get to down to work. Even if that work is just being playful with yourself. So let’s write. One thousand words. Right now.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the events in New York yesterday. It was my deepest pleasure to meet you all in person. The energy in both rooms was thrilling, particularly when everyone just sat down and wrote together. Silence, but for the click of the pens, the tap of the fingers on the keyboards. It was deeply meaningful.

OK: Onward to our first guest letter.

The first contributing author for this summer is the absurdly talented, New York Times-bestselling author Kaveh Akbar. Kaveh is the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and also the exuberant and exhilarating novel Martyr!, which I inhaled with great joy earlier this year. The New York Times Book Review said of it, “What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous…There is a life force coursing through the work, implacably curious, devoted to the small human things.” Honestly that novel made me want to be a better writer. I loved it a lot.

He has won a zillion awards, is beloved by many, is a wonderful presence in the world and we are honored to have him kick off the author contributor letters this year. He has chosen Doctors without Borders for his charitable donation, and his local independent bookstore is Prairie Lights. Here’s Kaveh on the magic of writing.

“The poet Franz Wright had a piece of paper hanging over his writing desk that said, ‘The pain of discipline or the pain of regret: choose one.’ The language is a little macho for my own writing space, but it does get at the heart of the heart of the thing: there’s nothing easier in this world than not writing. To mechanically write, to start moving a pen against a paper, is inescapably at odds with the object-at-rest creative inertia of doing literally everything else. 

To my knowledge, I have never been the beneficiary of a speaking burning bush or an angel’s clarion call. But to write, to wring from the ether a never before imagined sequence of language that never would have existed if not for my being here at this precise moment, working against the eclipsing momentum of quotidian living—well, that is the magic I have known. Call it discipline, call it routine, call it inspiration; naming magic doesn’t make it not magic. To write is the miracle into which I have deposited my living. That is why I keep showing up.”

Here’s to all the small miracles on the page today.

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.