On Losing People
I thought it would happen to me in my personal life, and it has. What I never thought was that it would challenge my belief that we as artists can point to the world's pain, name it, and at some level heal it.
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Thoughts
Essays and reflections on writing, culture, history, community, and the ideas that stay with us.
When the End Isn’t the End
I’m grateful for my editors, and my beta readers, and even my own despair of ever writing anything meaningful again... because it all combines to make for a better story, and in an age where absolute literary swill is heaped upon readers, I think they deserve that care.
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Try to Remember
What matters is what the reader can take away and incorporate into their own lives. What matters is creating something new out of old thoughts and half-formulated ideas, the detritus of lives, of lost loves and lost aspirations.
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The Morning Vampire
My neighbors all think I’m a vampire. I live on Cape Cod, the land of sun and sand, and most of the people around me are absolutely here for it.
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It’s Not So Foreign, After All
L.P. Hartley opened his novel The Go-Between with this famous phrase: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Philodemus’s stories bring a town to life, its daily round of activities, the things and places that were important to the people living there, the stories they told, the laughter they shared.
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We’ve Been Here Before
The first colonists didn’t see their land-grab as merely taking what they wanted; they too had a dream, and wanted it to come to fruition here.
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Books Like This Cannot Be Useless
So: imagine it. Imagine that night before, the butterflies in your stomach, the false bravado you put on for your friends, the last thoughts and memories and regrets that will all be swept up into apparent uselessness when you set out the next morning.
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Future Imperfect
And yet in the midst of all this fear, all this cynicism, all this despair, I am still reaching to find hope. Hope that small, distant voices can be heard. Hope that kindness and generosity of spirit are not only possible, but on the rise. Hope that the good of the community will prevail over the greed of individuals. Hope that violence will not forever engender more violence. I have to reach for hope, because without hope, there is only despair. And to despair is to die.
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Coincidences Do Exist!
And I know some people think that everything happens for a reason, that there are no coincidences, that destiny won’t be denied. Once fate has you in its sights, it’s all over.
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Murder Most Unladylike
As women, we understand what it feels like to live with fear humming constantly in the background of our lives.
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How Much Do Fictional Characters Reflect Their Authors?
Sometimes the characters we create are able to carry off a part of us we don’t generally share with others.
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Spring Cleaning for Writers
Clearing the clutter helps us understand what is and isn’t important, whether it’s objects in our homes or components of our stories.
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Finding Hope in Fictional Death
But mysteries cut through the wooliness of our understanding and the demands of the present and invite us to take a step back and think about all those things, precisely because the stakes are so high.
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A Useless Heroine
It resonates for us, too, as we feel paralyzed with helplessness: it often feels like our own resistance is about saying no, about doing the right thing, and sometimes—for some of us—to die. It feels absurd and futile. And yet it is what we’re compelled to do when faced with injustice.
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The Danger of Girls’ Schools
The danger of girls’ schools is that they remind us of things we’d rather forget. That we need safe spaces. That we are learning, growing, developing inside of high walls that are never high enough to keep violence out.
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Why AI Can’t Write Poetry
The rest of the bot’s writing is about on a par with its poetry, but the latter stands out because poetry appeals to more than just the brain: it’s an echo of lived experience, a reaction to the world’s constant change. So many poems illuminate the struggle we experience when life takes us in a different direction than the one we’d planned. Our hopes and desires are often thwarted and poetry gives word and life to the pain that ensues.
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Where Do We Find Meaning?
We’re outsourcing the activities that give meaning to our lives. Most of us look for what we might call “meaning opportunities”: places where we can do good, or create something, or exercise empathy. What happens when those are the very opportunities taken over by something that is non-sentient? What takes their place in our lives?
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It’s All About the Storms
It might be too obvious a metaphor, but I’m going for it anyway: the last few weeks and months, we’ve all been inundated with the daily rapid-fire shocking news that comes out of a regime whose principal goal appears to be creating chaos. The storm is shielding me from all that today.
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Television to the Rescue!
We cannot always be protesting, writing signs and letters, calling our legislators. We must do all those things, and more; but we also need to step back from them so we’re healthy enough to stay the course.
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Who Will Write Tomorrow’s Great Literature?
Literature is born out of a balance of that frustration and the utter joy one feels when the work does come together. When the practice ceases to be part of the creative process, that disconnect means that deep thoughts cannot find their way into literature.
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