Day 5 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because art is important.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because art is important. Literature is important. Our right to freedom of speech is important. When you write these 1000 words, you are standing up for all these things—and for yourself. Take that with you today, and every day. Your 1000 words are worth more than you may realize.

Welcome to day 5.

You’re really in it now. Don’t worry about the end goal. Just be in the thick of the scene or the sentence or the plot twist or the artistry. Make some shit up! Live inside your words today.

I have been walking by these perfectly assembled shoes on the street corner for days now, and I offer them to you today as a writing prompt if you need one.

Today’s guest contributor is Hala Alyan, a prolific and important poet, essayist, novelist, and now memoirist. Her publications include five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica.

Hala and I met her when our (now defunct) publisher threw us a joint publicity party for our 2017 releases, All Grown Up and Salt Houses. (One of those books was the winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, guess which one.) (It was not mine.) That day, I found out that in addition to all her writing, Hala is also a clinical psychologist, and I’m not going to lie, I did think at that moment: Why would you want to be a writer when you already have such an impressive real-person job? (Don’t worry, I know the answer to that question.) But I’m so glad she does it all, because she has brought so much art and wisdom to this world.

Yesterday, her memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home was published, coinciding with an absolutely stunning review in The New York Times by Safiya Sinclair. It sounds lyrical, experimental, and exciting. I cannot wait to read this book.

She has asked that her donation go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). Here she is, talking about writing as an invitation.

“I adore a good invitation. And perhaps none more than the ones we extend to ourselves. That’s what writing is for me: a portal without expiration. The invitation to enter memory, to play, to suffer and desire in imagination. To find value and stakes in the process itself.

Because writing isn’t really a discipline of results or endgame. I mean, it can be. A book is a lovely thing. A prize is delightful. The ego can be a fluffy, luxurious thing, and I’m not above feeding it from time to time. But the true root of writing, the heart of it, cannot be sustained on outcome alone. There are far, far easier highways to the ego. Ultimately, one writes because one must. One writes because the alternative is unimaginable or, if imagined, is bleak, mundane, a little less magical or a lot less survivable.

This is why I love generative rituals. This is why I love anything that trains the muscles of preparation, of rehearsal, of practice. Maybe more than anything, writing is an act of return. Like meditation. Like mothering. Like repair. It’s the steady, essential work of turning back toward what matters. Toward what aches, what loiters in your imagination, what is asking to be seen and translated. The work is sacred, then, because the work is everywhere. The work is in the procrastination, and in the disentangling from it. The work is the distraction of the children, the news cycle, the dumb argument with your mother, the crush on the neighbor. The work is the laundry pile and the thousand words. The work is the clunky sentence and the profound one.

I say that because middling work is crucial — and not just because fantastic work can’t exist without it. That line of thinking still engages with a capitalist, meritocratic preoccupation that organizes your words — which is to say: your time, your inspiration, your life force — into good and bad, worthy and less-than. I’d go further and say a lackluster writing day is valuable not as an opening act or clearing path for The Good Stuff, but because it’s part of that same practice. It’s just as precious. It takes precisely as much dedication to craft to write a mediocre paragraph as an astonishing one.

This is what I love most about this craft of ours: the permission is contingent on the intent. And the intent is already here — in the daydreaming, in toiling over adjectives, in finding writing community, even in reading this note. You already have all the invitation you need.”

Hope you have a great writing day.

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.