We Are All Still Here

A brief note: Soon I’ll be making more of the content subscription-based, and adding some new features like writing prompts and more regular interviews with authors. There will still be some free letters each month and 1000 Words of Summer itself will always be for and of the people. But as this community has grown—there are nearly 50,000 of you now!—and taken up more of my time it has become clear I will have to move toward a subscription-based model. I’m hoping all these changes will help me better serve this community, and support me as I make my own work.

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Hi friends.

I’m back in New Orleans, doing laundry, opening mail, petting my dog. Also collecting my thoughts, reassessing my present and plotting for the future. I am glad to be here, alive, now. Safe at home.

Next week, I am supposed to be on tour in Florida. We’re not sure if this will happen, of course, because of the storm. I just wanted to take this moment to send my best thoughts to my friends and family there, the bookstores that are supposed to host me, and all the nice people I hope to meet in person someday. I truly consider the state of Florida a good neighbor.

We are thinking about you in New Orleans.

I have some more reports and thoughts from my travels abroad—so many ideas to share!—but they will have to wait until next week. And I am still working on my novel a bit each day and reading and handwriting and walking and thinking and doing all the things I do in order to keep my job moving along. But also there is a hovering feeling. So today we wait.

Still, I wanted to say this one thing to you:

I know everything is on fire right now. Please don’t forget to write. Please don’t forget to take ten minutes or a half an hour to sit down and capture your feelings in this moment in time. Go hide somewhere—even your bathroom—if you need to get away for a second. Take your phone or a little notebook with you. Whatever you need to make it happen.

I just know that whenever I’m at my most distracted or stressed out, if I can make just a little time to scratch a few things down, I always feel better afterward. Because my feelings will have been held for a moment, captured and examined, seen in a new light. Writing allows us to see ourselves when we most feel lost or consumed by the world.

I often refer of it as a gift we can give ourselves, to take a look at ourselves like that. But lately I have been thinking of it like this: as a fight for ourselves. To make time to write is to make sure we’re all still here. And we are, we are!

We are all still here.

See you next week.

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.