Day 7 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because the book you want to read doesn't exist yet.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because the book you want to read—the thing you want to see in the world—doesn’t exist yet. So you must write it. No one has been talking about the thing you find most interesting or important or relevant or entertaining. Deep in your bones, you actually feel it’s an obligation. This story needs to be told. So you must tell it. One thousand words at a time.

How’s everyone hanging in there? You’ve been doing this for one week. A week is a long time. (I took a little existential pause yesterday, not going to lie.) For some inspiration about how to keep going in the long haul, I’ve asked our friend Alexander Chee to join me for a little live chat. This will happen tomorrow, Saturday June 7, at 9 AM CST. If you miss it, do not stress out, because it will be archived forever on this substack. But we hope to see you then.

The relationship of today’s contributor and I has a really clear trajectory—but it’s mostly in my mind. Last summer I spent a nice week in Brooklyn, and while I was there I visited the stellar bookstore Unnameable Books. There, based on a bookseller’s recommendation, I bought Rosa Alcalá’s book YOU. (Love a staff rec!) I then read and loved that book so much—like really fucking treasured it—that I mentioned it in the New York Times Book Review and have suggested it to so many people since.

(You can read three poems from it right here, if you would like to kickstart your day properly.)

Two months after that, I was at the Texas Book Festival, and Rosa and I finally met each other there, at a crowded party, and it was only a quick hello, but she seemed exactly like the person I thought she was when I was reading this very special, vivid, brilliant, funny, moving book of poems that kept me company at a time when I really needed it.

And that was it. Me and Rosa. Until I asked her to write this letter for all of us. So for me it was a real journey and I kind of thought about her a lot! Isn’t it interesting how we can develop these kinds of one-sided relationships with people we read? For her, she might know only a little of it. But here we are. And the letter is great.

Some important things about Rosa: she has published four books of her own poetry and as well as translations of poetry by Latin American writers. And she has received numerous awards and grants and her poems and translations are featured in publications such as The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and two volumes of The Best American Poetry. She holds the DeWetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program.

Rosa has chosen the Annunciation House for her donation, and today she muses on the idea of what happens to writers when we have all the time in the world:

“I’m a poet, so I don’t measure my progress by the number of words I write per day. Could an entire book of my poems contain more than a couple thousand words? Instead, progress for me is about following an idea or phrase until it becomes something that feels realized, ready to engage with a reader. Even an itty-bitty poem can take me many months, while some attempts are abandoned en route. Progress that leads to something concrete, I find, is most likely when I keep returning to what I've been writing; inevitably, I will get somewhere, it will come together. Setting aside time and shutting out other duties and distractions are important.

Still, for most of my writing life, this has been impossible. Writing has been mostly squeezed in between other things: teaching, serving on committees, raising a kid, losing my mother, watching the world burn, etc. And yet, in the last twenty-five years, I've written, published, and translated several books of poetry. So, imagine what I could do if I had all the time in the world!

Enter: All The Time in the World.

After twenty years in academia—the last three as department chair­--I was granted a research leave for two glorious semesters. For the leave, I proposed completing a research-based book of poems within what seemed a realistic timeline. But almost immediately, the pressure to advance from idea to final product methodically, where daily progress was clear and aimed at my goal, felt overwhelming. Where before I was just happy to have pockets of time to jot down notes or write a few lines of a nascent poem, not knowing where it would lead, now I was faced with entire days of self-doubt, with this proposed project hanging over my head, admonishing me to stop fucking around. But the more I pushed, the less progress I made.

My despair peaked in February, several months after my research leave began, at a two-week artist’s residency. On a long table in my studio, I placed pages of my project (I've grown to hate the word ‘project,’ by the way), hoping that in that rarefied space they'd tell me what to do to make something out of what felt like nothing. I didn't write much; I’d look at the snow outside my window waiting for a woodland creature to bless me, or I’d read the names etched on wooden tombstones above the fireplace, of those who created—I’m sure—great works of art in the studio before me (including an ex). Some days, I moved pages around or made some notes on them. But it didn't feel like progress; I mostly felt sleepy. Desperate, I bought an oracle, a deck of cards based on the I-Ching, at the local bookstore, and consulted it daily. It didn't help; I returned home and continued to struggle.

Some weeks later, I drew two cards—one reflecting ‘the present,’ the other ‘future potential’—that made so much sense and felt like such a relief that I took a photo of them, printed it out, and pinned it to my cork board.

In some ways, what the cards were telling me affirmed what I already knew about my own writing process, that taking ‘small steps toward success’ and moving ‘diligently’ and with ‘patience’ toward a goal was the way. What the cards acknowledged, however, was something I was ignoring: There were obstacles.

Because of all the time I had—I wasn't teaching or attending endless meetings, I was mostly ignoring (sorry!) emails—I thought I had no excuse. How could I not finish a book with so few time constraints? As the daughter of working-class immigrants, I just wanted to ignore the personal (so bourgeois), hoping a daily clock-in, clock-out grind would yield the product I desired.

But the cards were telling me that I couldn't ignore the obstacles—the real, daily challenges of being a parent and of being a person in our current world, but also those self-created barriers we erect that limit the writing, such as, ‘What the hell is this?’ or ‘This is not good’ or ‘Can I really say this?’

I was being reminded that sometimes what we are going through leaves little space for the real expansive thinking and energy needed for writing. Just because the work-related obstacles are gone doesn’t mean life is without other obstacles. That obstacles in writing are in some ways necessary. I guess I always thought that writing my previous books took x amount of time because I had so much else to do. But maybe the truth is that they took the time they needed; I wouldn’t have resolved many of the issues or reached an understanding of conceptual or thematic frameworks, etc., if everything else had fallen away.

Every day before I sit down to write, I look at the ‘present’ card, and say, ‘All you need to do is take one small step, that's enough.’ I know the card says to be flexible and gentle with others, but as a Capricorn, I'm most hard on myself, so I choose to interpret the card to mean me (but, look, I’m not always lovely to be around when I’m blaming everything and everyone for not writing, so that’s important, too). I then am buoyed by the promise of the ‘future potential’ card, that, sure, there are obstacles, but take these small steps, and eventually nothing will stand in your way.

Is it possible that all obstacles will be cleared from my path? Who knows, probably not. But maybe the point is that acknowledging the obstacles as real rather than blaming yourself will create conditions for the work to gain its footing despite them. And then, maybe, the time you have, will be exactly the time you need.”

Good luck with this seventh day of writing.

Jami