The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“In this time of book banning and mistrust of truth, I find writing poetry a most subversive act.”

— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”

“… I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.”

— Dodie Bellamy / “Hoarding as Ecriture”

“Sometimes I start a story with just a feeling. Often it is a place or an image. A house, a tree, a mountain. A sentence or a phrase. Sometimes it is like a line of music, a tone.”

— Andrea Barrett / The Creative Independent interview

“… It is also stolen from our own children, who will never know the amazing and spectacular world that we enjoyed when we were young. Already, at one degree, our globe is becoming impoverished and reduced. We might all weep for what we have done.”

— Mark Lynas / Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

“Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written … When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing … I am not fracking or selling useless things to lonely seniors or otherwise abusing my humanity. Find pleasure and joy.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit”

“In short, it has been a summer of climate insanity. But even so, this will be, on average, the coolest summer with the least climate chaos for the rest of your life.”

— Peter Kalmus / “To Understand the Scale of the Climate Emergency, Look at Hurricanes”

“Poetry is part seduction, part abduction.”

— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”

What I’m Listening To:

“Comfort knows no one”

— Florist / River’s Bed”