May 12, 2020
Writing Our Pandemic Stories: April & May
In this three-installment column, Chloe Caldwell and her 12-month essay generator students write about their daily life during the Covid-19 crisis
In this three-installment column, Chloe Caldwell and her 12-month essay generator students write about their daily life during the Covid-19 crisis
In this three-installment column, Chloe Caldwell and her 12-month essay generator students write about their daily life during the Covid-19 crisis
Writing like I didn’t think anyone would ever see my words made me bold and reckless, taking risks I might have avoided if I knew my book would be published.
Writing was not the thing. It got me to the real thing—how I saw myself and my relationship to the world.
Dillard stalked a world just beginning its freefall into an unprecedented amount of change, and her response was to look, and to look hard.
Latinidad, to me, was like a shrunken sweater. I never wanted to get rid of it, but I couldn’t imagine how it would possibly fit.
What I’d been looking for at the convent, I could find in reading and writing. If other writers could channel their desires, I could use it, too.
When my students finished a draft, all I wanted them to do was sit inside of it for longer than was comfortable. To acknowledge and celebrate what they’d accomplished.
Writing was just something I thought happened to people naturally, that whatever wasn’t written was eventually forgotten. And I wanted to remember everything.
Despite how fruitless both nursing and writing can feel, I choose to engage with both.
These worlds I dearly love, with science-fiction that supersedes the science in our reality, deserve Smart Drives and automatic doors and disabled heroes, too.
There are far more writers ringing up your groceries, writers pulling your daily espresso shot, writers in the laundries of hotels and security tagging jeans at the mall and filling your prescriptions and pouring your beer into a clean cold glass.
Writers, take note: A submission says, please pick me, I’ll be waiting. A pitch says, catch me or you’ll miss the ball.
You loved his talent first. You hope that he will not love you less, for all that you do not now achieve.
Will my face betray me when it’s time to talk about my book in public?
I wasn’t looking for pretty stories. I wanted messy, ugly, honest secrets.
I thought I was the exception to every rule about writing being a hard living. I got exactly what I deserved.
“No one had told me to prepare myself for this—for wanting what someone else had.”
My vision of a writer has always been someone quiet, someone introverted, and—especially—someone white.
Acoustic-rich spaces feel enlivening and the echoes they produce sound like life.
