The last time I was in Boston for work, I stopped by Trident Booksellers over in Back Bay and picked up four or five books. I’ve been wanting to get back into reading speculative fiction more consistently, and I love covers that don’t try to do too much while still giving a strong impression of the story. For that reason, The Devils stood out to me.

Now that I’ve finished reading it, I wanted to reflect on some of the craft-focused takeaways that stood out to me. In general, it was a fairly good book, but there were parts that I found poorly executed, and I want to highlight those as writing lessons about what goes into telling compelling stories.

Be forewarned that from here on out, you should expect spoilers.

What Worked Well

If I were to rate The Devils on a scale of 1-5, I’d give it a three. I certainly had issues with it, but I’d say that overall I had fun with the book and wouldn’t consider it a candidate for the DNF pile. Abercrombie makes some interesting narrative decisions worth noting, and he successfully pulls off an ensemble cast with POV pivots that are well executed.

Reimagining the “Prodigal Royal”

Plenty of fantasy books that I’ve read in my day have centered around a prince or princess who has been ejected from their kingdom– be it through war, political upheaval, usurpation, or being ferreted away at birth for their own safety.

For much of The Devils, you trod that familiar territory. Alex finds herself thrust into events outside of her control when a man finds her on the streets (as she’s about to be mutilated for not paying back her debts, no less), and claims that she is not just a grubby thief and street rat, she’s actually Princess Alexia Pyrogennetos, the rightful heir to the Serpent Throne of Troy.

From there, Alex is vaguely affirmed as someone who can claim the throne and unite the Eastern and Western church against the threat of the elves (more on that later), and embarks on a journey to reclaim “her” lost kingdom in the company of the eponymous devils of the book’s title.

Where things diverge from the standard prodigal royal trope is that later in the book, once Alex is already in Troy and effectively starting her rule, she reveals to her romantic interest in the narrative that she’s not the real Alexia Pyrogenettos, and that the real Alexia had died during a period of plague, and Alex had taken on her identity, not realizing who she actually was.

To make this twist go even further, Abercrombie seems to intentionally leave that plot line alone. It comes up as a detail to highlight Alex’s fearfulness and solidify the image she has of herself as a pretender, while also really driving home that she truly has gone from rags to riches, but her confession doesn’t become a major plot point. As a reader, my expectation was that there’d be a subplot in which the true nature of her identity is threatened to be revealed, or there’d be some kind of intervention in which others learn her secret but decide she should keep the throne anyway. But none of that happens– the secret comes out and then sort of dissipates. It’s a subversion of expectations that leads readers to expect more tension in an already tense situation, without introducing new plotlines or conflicts.

Ensemble Cast with Diverse Voices

In addition to the plot subtleties Abercrombie incorporates, another aspect of the book I really appreciated is that he carries a fairly large ensemble cast, frequently shifting between them from chapter to chapter, and still keeps the narrative moving forward while making each character’s voice and perspective unique.

Brother Diaz, Alex, Vigga/ the Vigga Wolf, Jakob of Thorn, Baptiste, Balthazar, and Sunny all get their turn in the spotlight (maybe Baron Rikard, too, but I honestly don’t recall if there are any chapters explicitly told through his perspective). Each time the POV character shifts, so does the tone of the writing. It’s easy to identify the POV character before anything is explicitly stated because each character has a distinct voice.

That’s not easy to do.

I think what anchors the character switching and large cast of characters really well is that Alex is the protagonist, and the other characters fit into the narrative in ways that support and centralize Alex’s character. Within the book's logic and lore, they are there to support Alex because they are bound by the pope's magic, a little girl who may or may not be the second coming of the savior. From a storytelling perspective, however, this framework ensures that, even as the narrative pivots, characters remain anchored in supporting a common goal, some more reluctantly than others.

Having each character take center stage in our vantage point as readers provides us with a better insight into each person’s worldview and individual character arc. For characters like Vigga, for example, we also get a clearer sense of why they are the way they are– her common refrain of “even before the bite,” the way her thoughts are fleeting and circuitous, the way she wrestles with letting the wolf take over, and so on.

What Didn’t Work as Well

Before getting into any discussion of what I didn’t think worked particularly well in the novel, I want to be clear that I’m not diminishing Abercrombie’s skill or success, and I certainly don’t want to heap negativity on him or his work. Instead, I want to approach this through the lens of writing craft and why certain aspects didn’t land as well.

Overwrought Characterizations

While the ensemble cast was a net benefit to the novel, I think there were times when the characterization became overdone. How many times did we need to hear Vigga talk about her “twat” and her sex drive for it to get across that she’s animalistic because she’s a werewolf? Or Baptiste’s constant “oh, I once…” list of experiences that started off as charming and quirky, but quickly turned into an “I GOT IT” reaction? Oh, and did you know Balthazar is arrogant? You probably couldn’t tell from the fact that he referred to himself in the third person and as one of the three most impressive necromancers in Europe, constantly.

The characters' variance was fun, but it didn’t feel like they really went anywhere. The sum of the devils’ arcs is that they chose to help Alex during the novel’s climax rather than return to the Holy City right away. Other than that, we don’t really see them grow much over the course of the novel. Maybe there’s commentary to be made about them being constrained by their true nature, but with how much airtime each character got, you’d expect to have that electric third rail in which each of them had their own arc. Instead, what we got was more like a Marvel movie, with several potentially gripping characters vying for attention and ultimately revealing no real depth or compelling reason to root for them.

The Elves’ Plotline was Underdeveloped

Throughout the book, there were several references to the elves of the east and the threat that they posed to Europe. They’re described as bloodthirsty, vicious, subhuman creatures who are forces of primeval destruction and harm. At the same time, the quietest, gentlest member of the ensemble cast of protagonists is… an elf.

Abercrombie seemed to be setting up the elves and the way they’re discussed as almost a metaphor for how Arabs and Muslims were depicted during the Catholic Church’s Inquisitions; their depiction was less of an accurate assessment and more a garbage bin full of propaganda.

And so, I expected that to be a point that’s better emphasized throughout the novel. Everything seems to be pointing toward an arc where characters are able to identify their own biases, or at least question their assumptions, about elves. While our central protagonist develops romantic feelings for Sunny, the elf of the group, by the end of the novel, she seems to still perpetuate the belief that elves, collectively, are bloodthirsty and subhuman. Jakob of Thorn seems to be the only character with a metered view of elves. Having fought in previous crusades, he’s one of the few characters with firsthand experience fighting against elves. Yet when asked if elves are as cruel and evil as people say, he indicates that they’re no more evil than humans, which is to say, yes, they are.

The plotline about elves and the parallels to real-world Islamophobia just feel underdeveloped and incomplete.

Perhaps Abercrombie is setting us up for a sequel in which this subplot moves front and center, and then that’s where things start to get unpacked. In lieu of a sequel, though, things just feel incomplete and unsatisfying on this front.

Final Thoughts

Overall, The Devils was a solid book and a fun read. It did get a bit repetitive at times, and the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped, but it’s definitely still worth picking up. If Abercrombie does follow it with a sequel, I’d probably read it.

For writers, especially those of us who don’t have the platform and track record of Joe Abercrombie, what does and doesn’t work particularly well in the novel serves to underscore the core elements of craft we have to take into consideration to ensure that our own work lands.

• Always have a central protagonist. Even in an ensemble cast, you need someone whose story anchors everything else.

• If you’re going to leverage tropes and archetypes, give them a twist. Subverting reader expectations can be a great way to add tension and keep readers engaged.

• Avoid dangling plotlines. Creating mystery and allowing readers to fill in the gaps can be an effective way to engage audiences in the act of worldbuilding. In fact, it’s one of the fundamental principles behind building fandoms. But when character arcs are incomplete– when the electricity of that character-driven third rail is missing– plotlines can feel less like opportunities to fill in the blanks and more like unsatisfying conclusions.  

A Quick Reintroduction to Me and This Newsletter

The last few months have been, frankly, absurd.

At my day job, I don’t recall ever going through a period as consistently intense as the last four or five weeks have been.

On top of that, I stepped away from my newsletter while figuring out the situation with my podcast. To make a long story short, contracts are funny things, and you shouldn’t sign one related to your business unless you have a concrete plan for how it impacts the long-term. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, and I needed time to make sure I could relinquish my rights to the Inkwell Insights podcast without also having to give up my newsletter. (Something something brand ownership rights, something something losing 70% of any future subscription revenue, something something just not worth it.)

I’ve felt burnt out. Frustrated. Disappointed in myself.

With my podcast and the way I envisioned this newsletter evolving over time, I was really focused on building an audience and a platform that I could leverage for future writing and publishing endeavors. I’m an entrepreneur at heart and a certified business bitch by day, so I was looking at my newsletter and podcast exclusively through a strategic lens.

Only my heart wasn’t in it. Sitting down to draft a podcast script or a newsletter with the intent of growing an audience left me feeling jaded and annoyed, not inspired. If anything, it made me want to write less because it meant I had to spend even more of my free time in front of a computer screen.

One night, while unable to sleep, I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and opened the Notes app. In my restless, unfiltered state, here’s what flowed out:

Going into 2026, I want to disappear into writing more. No podcasting, no vlogging, no paid advertising, no trying to build a brand. I want to delete my Twitter account and the five or so Instagram and Facebook pages I’ve accrued other than my personal one. I want to close my LLC and cancel all the monthly subscriptions that I just don’t need. I’ll allow myself to keep a newsletter for personal reflections I wish to share, and a simple personal website that holds onto my name as a domain but which requires no regular maintenance or tracking analytics. I’m starting from scratch. Over the course of the coming year, I will publish at least one piece of short fiction and one essay. I will write consistently. Attend one writing conference. That is it. That is the extent of expectations I wish to shoulder. I aim to finish a draft of my manuscript. More and more, I want to figure out how to disconnect after work. Turn my brain off. Not OFF off. But work off. Maybe I remove slack and my work email from my phone. I deserve to give myself a year to create rather than capitalize. I’m not ready to leave my job and join a communal artists cult, but I need to strike a better balance so that I don’t reach that point.

The following day, in a slightly rested state with a semi-clearer head, I sat down and journaled about it again. The more I reflected on why I wanted to start over from scratch, the more I realized just how threadbare I was becoming. Or, maybe moth-eaten would be a more accurate description. Not only was I trying to cram more and more and more into my schedule, but I was also confining my writing to a very narrow box of what I thought it needed to be. Rather than using my writing to liberate my mind or process my feelings, I’ve been restricting myself to thinking and writing only about what can build a brand.

And that’s a shit way to approach writing, if we’re being honest. It just felt right to me for a while because it’s the narrative I have been surrounded by for so long.

So, if you will, allow me to reintroduce myself and this newsletter.

My name is Blake Reichenbach. I live in Kentucky. I write essays and speculative fiction. I have a big ol’ dog named Walker– he’s deaf and very affectionate. I’m a gym rat, bookworm, and introvert. I love being alone, in the mountains, and alone in the mountains.

As for this newsletter, fuck brandability. It’s just a writer writing about writing, and the interesting things he dives into along the way. That’s it.

Now that that’s settled, I want to tell you a bit about what I’ve started writing recently…

Current WIP: “Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise”

As I’ve intimated in the subtitle of this piece, I’ve found a renewed vigor to my creativity by going full redneck.

For much of my childhood, I distanced myself from the redneck moniker and the stereotypes of Appalachia. I didn’t want to be seen as a dumb hillbilly. All I ever really had going for me was my intelligence, so it always felt like a kick in the teeth when I’d see Appalachian/ poor Southern characters in movies or on TV, and they were the comic relief village idiot character.

I feared the constraints of those stereotypes and set my sights on the big city (which, at the time, was Louisville, Kentucky —a city that isn’t a small town, but also isn’t quite a big city) and trained myself to speak without an accent.

But, because life is funny, I’ve landed back in Eastern Kentucky and have lived here for about six years now.

Not only have I come to terms with my locale enough to be comfortable, but I’ve also learned to embrace and celebrate Appalachia. The perception of Appalachia that I had as a kid was one filtered by shame and my own fears and insecurities. The longer I live in the region and the more I study it, the more I love it.

And in my current manuscript, I’ve given myself license to explore Appalachia– to embrace how I grew up, paint the intricacies of small towns, and, most importantly, incorporate Appalachia’s rich history of diversity, political resistance, and ecology.

In fact, my turn of phrase– “going full redneck”– was intentional. The term redneck has its roots in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, which took place in West Virginia. It was the largest labor uprising in the United States and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. Coal companies targeting the United Mine Workers union paid off Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and the Logan County Sheriff’s office, particularly Sheriff Don Chafin, to bust the union by any means necessary.

Miners were thrown from their houses. Harassed on the streets. Faced threats to themselves and their families.

And the miners didn’t back down. They banded together, supported each other, and continued to resist the coal companies’ exploitation. A symbol of solidarity, they wore red bandanas around their necks to identify each other.

As tensions escalated, Sheriff Don Chafin infamously gave orders to his men to “open fire on any of those redneck bastards you see.”

The Battle of Blair Mountain was bloody, and the National Guard was deployed to bring it to an end.

There’s so much more to say about Blair Mountain, but I’m saving that for another day and communicating the abridged version for now.

The point I’m getting at is that I love living in Eastern Kentucky. Yes, Appalachia has its problems, but no, those problems aren’t because its people are inferior. Appalachia’s poverty is a policy decision. For too long, it has been under the thumb of coal companies that aren’t even headquartered in our state. Appalachia represents a form of American colonialism within our own country: those rich with power but poor in resources exploit those poor in power but rich in resources.

Appalachia is stripped of its coal and has its land destroyed so that people who aren’t even from here or living here continue to get richer, while jobs, opportunities, and stability never materialize in its hills.

Starting to understand this history of internal-colonialism and Appalachia’s beautiful history of resistance and labor organization has removed that lens of shame I looked through as a child, and replaced it with one of defiant hope.

In my current WIP, “Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise,” set in modern-day Eastern Kentucky, I’m exploring themes of defiant hope and homecoming. To give you the CliffsNotes on what it’s all about, I’ll look to the Twitter theme of describing one’s manuscript poorly for comedic effect:

It’s an Appalachian love triangle where a squirrely gay rat boy longs for the straight golden retriever himbo who longs for the nerdy black girl who longs to punch god. Oh, and there are coal demons.

To be a little less tongue-in-cheek, it’s a sort of Appalachian retelling of the Orpheus myth, following three friends who have reunited after several years apart. As they investigate a string of recent disappearances, they uncover a secret history of murder and human sacrifice that has haunted their town for generations. By the time they realize what they’re dealing with, it’s too late. They already know too much, and there’s no turning back. If they’re to survive and bring the truth to light, they’ll have to first descend into the darkness of the coal mines, where more awaits them than ore and dust…

It’s spooky. It draws on magical realism and elements of horror. It’s rooted in classical Greek mythology and Appalachian history. It’s a little gay. (Okay, it’s actually very gay.)

And I’m having so much fun writing it.

“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” – Austin Kleon

We’re 211 days into 2025. That’s just about 58% of the way through the year.

Transparently, I’m not where I thought I would be– certainly not where I wanted to be– in my creative processes by this point in the year.

It’s been a year of stops and starts, drafting and redrafting, and then more stops and starts.

This is true across several of my creative pursuits. Getting my novel’s manuscript into a state I’m happy with, staying consistent with my podcasting and newsletter writing, and even reading on a consistent basis have all felt like uphill battles. These are things I love and enjoy, yet struggle to adhere to.

When I sat down to write this particular newsletter, I hesitated. There was this uncomfortable feeling in my gut that admitting that I have been struggling to perform creative acts would expose me as a fraud– as just another corporate tech bro who pretends to have a soul. But, as my therapist would say (hey, Necole!), that’s just the narrative that I’m telling myself in the moment, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true or complete.

In reality, the more time I spend among creatives, the more I realize that the struggles of living a creative life in the modern world are shared ones. Writers who have a flawless commitment to their craft, showing up in the same place at the same time every day to write, while admirable and aspirational, are the exception, not the rule. The rest of us are slogging through the muck and messiness of human life, struggling against the odds to cling to and celebrate art despite the pressures and fractured attention that precipitate from work and family obligations and having the audacity to try also squeeze in a gym routine and a social life.

Despite my efforts feeling constrained and fractured, I still find myself clinging to aspirations of a more creative life. I can envision what I wish to get out of my creativity and start to put form to it, even if those goals are still a good ways away across a field of hard work, concerted effort, and the continual pursuit of learning.

In the last issue of the newsletter, I spoke about evolving my book selling efforts to make things simpler and easier to manage, even if it’s less profitable. I’ve since done that and am feeling great about it. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Having a streamlined (uh oh, soulless corporate bro-speak alert!) bookselling process is only one piece of the puzzle. Here are some of the others:

I Want a Podcast Co-Host

Talking to myself on a microphone is exhausting, and in an upcoming episode of the podcast, I talk quite a bit about all the behind the scenes work that takes away from the fundamental part of discussing creativity and writing that I really enjoy.

The current model of scouting for podcast guests, writing outreach emails, planning the conversation and questions, interviewing and recording, and then finally coming up with the show notes and description details is more than I can realistically sustain at this time. Plus, it’s a model that I’m not fully in love with.

What I would love to do moving forward is have a podcast cohost who I can converse with about our individual creative processes, journeys, and questions. I envision a sort of creative co-coaching session that we record and share out so that other writers can learn from our progress, missteps, and the lessons we learn along the way.

(If you think you’d be a good cohost for a show like that, reach out!)

I Want to Start a Writing Support Group (and Maybe Book Club)

This is another one I’ve been noodling on for a while.

Earlier this year (or was it last year? Time is weird and confusing), I attempted to launch a writers’ book club. My goal was to do a new book every other month, and I started with Lisa Cron’s Story Genius.

I ran ads on Facebook and Instagram for about a month leading up to the bookshop, and spent a bit over $450 in the process. About 10 people signed up with a $35 registration fee, meaning I was in the negative money-wise, but I didn’t mind– it was a start and felt like something I could build momentum with.

Until the book club actually started. In the first session, two people out of the ten who registered showed up on Zoom. One left as soon as I asked folks to briefly introduce themselves so we could get to know each other. The other was a trooper. He stayed for the first two sessions when it was just him and I, but had something come up and couldn’t make it to the third session.

The first book club was a flop. But I still feel like there’s something there. Writers need support from other writers. Reading and responding to new ideas, and having our assumptions challenged and refined, is how we hone our craft and sense of taste.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have kept pushing on those 10 who originally signed up. More following up and diversifying my offerings and whatnot. Maybe then I could have grown that effort into a functioning writing support group, but at the time, I was exhausted and demoralized. Literary icon Lady Gaga once said something along the lines of how she plays every stadium show like it’s in a dive bar and every dive bar like it’s a stadium. The one-person book club was my dive bar moment, and I went into it like I was playing a stadium. I poured a lot of hard work into that effort, and it simply didn’t pay off.

I don’t regret it. Hard work for a good cause is seldom regretted. But I did come out on the other side of it thinking, “yeah… I’m ready to not do that again.”

So, then, if I’m not going to do that again, what will I do? I still want to bring writers together and to invest time and energy there, but what I do moving forward will have to take a different shape. It will have to be something that feels more sustainable and that has better buy-in. As much as I had hoped a $35 commitment would keep folks on the hook for their own involvement, that approach didn’t pan out. I’ll do what I always do– reflect, rally, and try something else.

The Obvious One: I Want to Write More

Amidst everything else going on this year, my own writing has fallen a bit by the wayside. When it comes to my writing, I go through these cycles where I’m extremely excited about a project, dive in, realize the story has some major flaws, and then lose all momentum.

The classic writing advice would be to create a routine– a ritual– and stick to it, even when I’m not “feeling it” about my writing. And I think there’s truth in that. I should show up and write even when I’m not in the mood, and that is something I’m working on.

But deeper than that, I think I need to get more comfortable with slowing down and doing pre-writing and planning for my manuscripts. If I spent more time understanding my characters, the story I’m telling, and how the plot puzzle pieces all fit together, I suspect that sense of not having a clear sense of where the narrative is going would start to unwind a bit.

I’ve got my spooky Appalachian-inspired fantasy manuscript that I’ve been wrestling with for the majority of the year more or less fully outlined at this point. That means I’ve abandoned the hundred or so pages I’ve already written of the previous draft, but having the outline and major story beats ready to run with does help me have a sense of direction. At times, it’s odd. I feel like past Blake has locked present Blake into decisions present and future Blake wouldn’t have necessarily made about the narrative, but rather than pantsing it and going with what I feel in the moment, I take a pause and consider how the changes I’m thinking through would have a domino effect on the other parts of the narrative.

That’s good. Probably.

Considering myself a fairly slow writer, I’m not going to set an ambitious goal for myself like “have a complete draft by the end of the year.” Hell, it’s already August, which means it’s practically September, which means it’s basically Q4, which means it’s essentially already 2026. But, I do want to push myself by having a draft done by my birthday next May.

Here’s to Renewed Creativity for the Rest of the Year

How are you feeling about your creative ambitions? Are you living in a way that your actions reflect your goals? Or, are there ways that you can realign and try again?

Remember, it’s not about how many times the horse bucks you off. It’s how many times you get back in the saddle.

If you’re like me and just hashtag not feeling it TM, it’s a good time to take a beat and consider what’s important to you and where you’re currently living in a way that’s not aligned with those values. Feel free to reach out if you want to vent or bounce ideas around about how to change things up and try something new.

Cheers.

-Blake

I enjoy entrepreneurship almost as much as I enjoy creative writing. Honestly, given my experiences as a product manager in the software industry, entrepreneurship can be a little easier and comes more naturally than creative writing at times.

But recently, I’ve found myself burned out to the point that I’m not doing either my entrepreneurship or creative writing very well or consistently. I’ve felt torn between what I ought to focus on. Do I write today? Should I develop a better marketing strategy for the bookstore? Should I rebuild a portion of the website to enhance its optimization for search and AI retrieval?

Caught in a swift current of things that I can do–should do– I struggled to get stably back on the shores of actually doing.

I end up feeling stressed, unfocused, and reach for my phone as a distraction instead of putting my time and energy into the things that I know will make me happier and more fulfilled in the long run.

Making things even more stressful, the distributor I partnered with to fulfill book orders… isn’t great.

How I Fell Off the Writing Wagon

To save on upfront cash needed, I wasn’t keeping bookshop inventory on hand. Instead, I partnered with a book distributor (who I won’t name yet in case I need to avoid burning any bridges), and would use their direct-to-home fulfillment services to essentially dropship book orders as they came in. My thought process was that I’d spend a year or so operating this way to learn the ropes and get a feel for what my audience was interested in before investing the money to operate like a more traditional bookstore.

But, of course, things weren’t so simple. Insert plot twist one. This distributor carries almost any in-print title you can think of, and their technology is garbage, meaning I couldn’t simply integrate with my Shopify site directly. For a while, they offered their own e-commerce platform, built directly on top of their systems, but they weren’t allowing new stores to use it, which meant it wasn’t an option for me.

My best option was to hire a third-party service for database management. Essentially, I paid a guy on a monthly basis (and I want to be clear– he was great, responsive, helpful, and not the problem in this situation) to prepare inventory update files for me. I’d give him the parameters of what I wanted to carry, and he’d run a SQL query against the distributor’s licensed data. Then, he'd send me all the data I needed for my inventory in a tidy CSV file. Throughout the week, he’d send updates of titles the service no longer carried that I needed to remove from my shop, inventory updates, and new titles that met my criteria.

As orders came in, I’d log into the distributor’s site, pull up the title, choose to ship it directly to my customer’s home, and then put in all of their shipping information. Again, part of the process that should be easy to automate with a few API calls, but the distributor made sure that was impossible. Allegedly, there were ways to integrate with Shopify for direct purchasing, but this came with a setup cost of several thousand dollars. Given what I’ve seen of this distributor, I would not trust the reliability of that integration.

So, the book order process has been incredibly manual and time-consuming. I largely didn’t mind, though. It still felt good to be selling books.

Plot twist two. Because I was getting SQL queries containing several thousand book titles at a time, I couldn’t review all of them. The way that this distributor set up their book data also meant that the level of specificity about what you wanted to carry in your shop was pretty broad.

I realized this when orders started coming in for titles that I didn’t want to carry– blatant pseudoscience making claims about apricot seeds curing cancer, antisemitic titles that echoed Nazi ideology, books that the Southern Poverty Law Center has cited for encouraging race wars.

Blindsided, I canceled and refunded orders, removed titles from my shop, and updated my data guy that I didn’t want to carry those ISBNs anymore. And yet, what I then realized was that often these titles are distributed under multiple editions, meaning multiple ISBNs, so it was like playing a game of bullshit whack-a-mole to find all of the garbage that I had unknowingly been carrying.

What’s particularly frustrating about these titles isn’t only that I didn’t want to list them to begin with, but also that if I had kept them, they’d be my store’s best sellers. My podcasting, blogging, and newsletter efforts didn’t result in sales of titles that I wanted to sell– books about writing, classic literature, essays, poetry, or groundbreaking fiction. What actually brought people to my shop… the low-quality, conspiratorial titles that had slipped into my inventory by mistake.

Plot twist three comes into play now. I made strides in removing the unwanted titles (I actually found a good use for AI here and was able to use it to audit my inventory programmatically to flag titles that met hate speech criteria or were written by anyone from Fox News), but the issues weren’t over. The distributor I was working with had a really inconsistent schedule for actually sending out my orders. Some customers’ orders would be in the mail within a day. Others… three, four, even five days. And then, I had a few cases where customers got the wrong book altogether. Reaching out to the distributor was a crapshoot. They didn’t make it easy to actually get support from a human, instead trying as hard as possible to send you to their outdated knowledge base articles first. When you finally did get ahold of an actual person, it was usually not very helpful. You’d get generic answers that didn’t seem to relate to the question you asked directly or the delays would be so long that nothing was relevant anymore.

“Could you let me know when order 1234 will ship? I can see that it has been marked as processing for a few days now, but it looks like that title should be in stock.”

*3 days later* “Processing means that we’re getting your order ready to ship.”

***

“My customer changed their mind about order 4567 shortly after I entered it. How can I cancel this order so that it doesn’t ship?”

*A week later* “What do you mean? That’s already shipped. Pay for the customer to send it back to you, then you can send it back to us, and get a partial refund.”

***

“Hi, can you tell me about the bookshop starting inventory program mentioned on the website? From what I understand, you all have a program for helping bookstores get started with their initial stocking needs, and I’d love to learn more about the costs and how that works.”

*several days later* “Account number.”

“Oh, sure, my account number is ABC1234.”

*several days later* “I’m not the right person for this question.”

“Could you please point me to who is? This is the email address on the website for this program, by the way, so if the program has changed, that may need to be updated.”

“You need to talk to the rep for your region.”

“Great! Who is that? I’m in Kentucky. I don’t see regions or reps listed on the website.”

*ghosts me*

Celebrating books, literature, art, and literacy is one of my chief joys in life, but working with this distributor was quickly draining me of that joy. And the amount of time I spent stressing over my bookstore, which, by the way, doesn't turn a profit most months, meant that that was time I wasn’t spending reading or writing.

That brings me to plot twist four: the changes I’m making to get back on the wagon.

How I’m Reprioritizing My Creativity

The product manager side of my brain doesn’t turn off. Ever. So, a part of me thought that as I digested all of the frustrations I have with the book distributor I’ve been working with, I’d be cooking up a business plan for what a better alternative would look like. Unfortunately, this particular distributor has a bit of a monopoly on book distribution in the United States, and it would be delicious to launch an enterprise that could challenge them.

But! My biggest focus right now is my own creativity. Developing the business plan, securing funding, and establishing the necessary supply chain management systems to compete would be an ungodly amount of work. It would be a full-time career for several years to get started.

As a result, I have chosen a very organic and honest response to those ideas: nah, fuck that, we’re writing.

Later this month, I will officially retire my Shopify site and will, instead, leverage Bookshop.org’s referral system to build out browsable bookshelves and promote the books I want to.

Additionally, I’ve returned to using my sunrise alarm clock, which sits on the far side of my room. It lights up and makes bird noises, and because it’s on the far side of the room, I can’t just reach over to my bedside table and snooze it like I can my phone. Since it makes me get out of bed to silence it, it’s easier to stay moving. As a bonus, unlike when I use my cell phone for my alarm clock, there’s no temptation to start scrolling after I’m torn from my slumber. I tumble out of bed, turn off the alarm clock, stumble to the kitchen, and start brewing that first cup of ambition.

That’s when I do my morning pages. I don’t want to dive in my manuscript as soon as I’ve woken up because my brain needs a little time and a lot of caffeine to come into itself, but I can still grab a journal and set an intention for the day– what kind of day do I want it to be? What’s on my mind? What did I dream about? And so on.

After morning pages, it’s newsletter or manuscript time. I’m trying to alternate days so that I get in a better cadence of working on both, but there’s part of that scheduling that I still need to figure out. For example, if I wake up thinking about my manuscript but it’s a newsletter idea, I want to make sure I capture that spark; at the same time, I want to be disciplined and consistent about when I show up for either.

The podcast is still a bit of a wild card. I would love to find a cohost and shift the show to us talking about what we’re reading, what we’re working on, and having a dialogue about what’s going on in culture and publishing. Scouting for and recruiting podcast guests is very tiresome and I don’t enjoy solo episodes where I monologue. I need to figure out a better cadence for brainstorming, doing outreach, and recording episodes since I’m pretty inconsistent and fly by the seat of my pants at this point.

But, I’ll get around to it. For now, I want to focus on reinvigorating my writing and getting to a place where I enjoy writing online and maintaining my website again– all without the added frustrations of working with Ing… oh wait, I said I’m not going to name the distributor, right, right, right…

What About You? How Do You Balance Creativity with Everything Else?

That’s where my creative journey is at currently. I’m curious, dear reader, how do you approach balancing your creativity with all the other responsibilities and distractions in your life? What are some of the tactics you’ve tried that you’ve found to be particularly helpful?

You know… the day we grill meats and light decorative explosives to celebrate freedom from colonial occupation (while, over 200 years later, we *checks notes* still engage in direct colonial occupation of US Territories and fund and arm the occupation of Palestine).

Perhaps I’m just jaded or burnt out, but I don’t feel particularly celebratory this year. I haven’t even posted a meme of Jennifer Coolidge saying, “it makes me want a hot dog real bad,” like every other unique homosexual. Rather than keep my neighbors awake and their dogs disturbed by lighting explosives in my driveway late into the night, I figured I would sit down and do a little reading and writing, combing through what other writers and thinkers have to say about this funny little concept of independence.

“What is freedom? The power to live as one wishes”

Marcus Tullius Cicero, often just referred to as Cicero, was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher (among other occupations) who lived between 106 BCE and 43 BCE.

The quote used as the heading of the section is from Cicero’s writings, specifically his “dialogues.” Roman dialogues had their roots in Greek tradition, drawing heavily upon philosophical dialogues (such as those employed by Socrates and Plato to convey their ideas and teachings). They use a question-driven rhetorical approach to explore ideas and concepts.

What is a man? What is the meaning of life? How do we know the gods guide us?

Throughout a dialogue, rhetoricians present a series of assumptions and then question them to determine what can be known, proven, disproven, or accepted as truth pending further discoveries. I’m oversimplifying a bit, and I’m sure my undergrad ethics professor would be shaking his head if I turned in that explanation for an essay, but that’s okay– I’ve been out of undergrad for a long-ass time. Aside from the occasional dream in which I have to turn in an assignment lest my degree be revoked, I seldom concern myself with professorial approval these days.

My point is: in Cicero’s tradition of oratory, questions are posed and then assumptions are examined and unpacked. And over the many years since Cicero penned his question– What is freedom? The power to live as one wishes– many other writers, thinkers, and artists have engaged in flavors of Roman dialogue, pressuring and questioning the same question and assumptions to arrive at different conclusions.

Nelson Mandela in Dialogue with Cicero

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela occupies a unique position in the global imagination—simultaneously a historical figure and a moral archetype, a man who transformed from revolutionary to reconciler without losing his radical edge. His 27 years of imprisonment under South Africa's apartheid regime didn't diminish his vision; they refined it. His cultural significance extends far beyond South Africa's borders because he represents something increasingly rare: proof that transformative change is possible without sacrificing one's moral center.

The Dialogue Between Cicero and Mandela

If we imagine Mandela encountering Cicero's definition of freedom—"the power to live as one wishes"—we might picture him nodding thoughtfully before offering a gentle but firm correction. Cicero's formulation, emerging from the privileged position of a Roman senator, assumes that individual desire and collective good naturally align. But Mandela, writing from the depths of apartheid's brutality, understood that true freedom requires a fundamental reimagining of what it means to wish and to live.

His response—"to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others"—doesn't reject Cicero's insight so much as it completes it. Where Cicero sees freedom as the absence of external constraint, Mandela sees it as the presence of mutual recognition. The Roman philosopher's "power to live as one wishes" becomes, through Mandela's lens, the responsibility to wish for a world where such power is universally accessible. It's a shift from freedom as personal liberation to freedom as collective transformation.

Mark Twain Chimes In

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain occupies a distinctly American position as a beloved national satirist—the court jester with a license to speak uncomfortable truths about the contradictions of democracy. Writing in the Gilded Age, when American ideals were colliding spectacularly with American realities, Twain perfected the art of the double-edged compliment. His genius lay in exposing hypocrisy not through righteous indignation but through deadpan observation, letting the absurdity speak for itself. He became the voice of American self-awareness, the writer who could celebrate and skewer the nation's promises simultaneously, understanding that the distance between our stated values and lived practices is often where the most important truths hide.

Twain's Sardonic Response:

If Mandela's response to Cicero deepened the philosophical conversation about freedom, Twain's contribution would be to puncture its earnestness with a dose of pragmatic skepticism. Where Cicero championed individual liberty and Mandela called for collective responsibility, Twain might chuckle at both men's apparent faith in human nature. His observation about Americans possessing "freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either" reads like a gentle mockery of the entire philosophical enterprise—a recognition that all our high-minded theorizing about freedom means little if we lack the courage to actually exercise it.

But Twain's cynicism cuts deeper than mere pessimism. He's not dismissing the value of freedom so much as highlighting the psychological barriers that prevent us from claiming it. While Cicero assumes we naturally desire to live freely and Mandela calls us to extend that freedom to others, Twain suggests that most people prefer the comfortable illusion of freedom to its messy reality. His "prudence" is really cowardice dressed up in respectability—the tendency to mistake silence for wisdom and conformity for civility. In Twain's formulation, the enemy of freedom isn't external oppression but internal self-censorship, the quiet capitulation that happens when we choose comfort over courage.

Noor Hindi Highlights The Ongoing Need for Freedom Today

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

-”Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi

Noor Hindi enters this philosophical conversation about freedom not as another voice in the dialogue but as someone demanding we acknowledge the violence that makes such leisurely discussions possible. Her poem "Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying" operates as both art and accusation, rejecting the traditional boundaries between aesthetic contemplation and political urgency. Where Cicero, Mandela, and Twain theorize about freedom from positions of relative intellectual safety, Hindi writes from the immediacy of ongoing genocide—a context that renders abstract philosophical inquiry not just irrelevant but obscene. Her work represents a generation of artists who refuse to separate craft from conscience, who understand that in a world where "children throw rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies," the luxury of apolitical poetry becomes a form of complicity.

Freedom as Survival, Not Philosophy:

If we imagine Hindi encountering our previous thinkers' definitions of freedom, her response would be visceral and immediate. Cicero's "power to live as one wishes" becomes grotesquely inadequate when applied to Palestinians who "don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons." Mandela's call to "respect and enhance the freedom of others" takes on urgent specificity when those others are being systematically erased. Even Twain's cynical observation about Americans' "prudence never to practice" their freedoms gains new weight when Hindi declares, "I know I'm American because when I walk into a room something dies"—a recognition that American identity itself is built on the destruction of others' possibility for freedom.

Hindi's poem doesn't offer a competing definition of freedom so much as it exposes the conditions that make such definitions possible. Her line "One day, I'll write about the flowers like we own them" contains both longing and rage—the desire for the kind of freedom that would allow for beauty without the constant backdrop of death, and the recognition that such freedom is currently the privilege of those whose survival isn't in question. In Hindi's formulation, freedom isn't a philosophical concept to be debated but a material condition to be fought for, not through dialogue but through the radical act of refusing to let atrocity become normalized. Her promise to "haunt you forever" transforms the traditional role of the poet from observer to witness, from entertainer to conscience—a voice that won't allow us the comfort of looking away.

This conversation about freedom doesn't end with Hindi's poem—it begins there. Because if we've learned anything from this philosophical relay race, it's that each generation must answer the question anew: What does it mean to be free? Cicero's individual liberty, Mandela's collective responsibility, Twain's cynical honesty, and Hindi's urgent witness all live inside that question, demanding we choose which voice we'll amplify with our actions.

The question now is whether we'll write about flowers while others become daisies, or whether we'll finally practice the freedoms we claim to cherish.

To say that I’ve been a fan of Willa Cather’s writing for a while is an understatement.

I first read her 1918 novel, My Ántonia, in high school. At fifteen, I found the novel somewhat dull… at least, the first half of it. As I forged through it, though, I found that there was something about the story that I couldn’t shake. Between the lines and pages, I found myself reading the story of a young man and a young woman, neither of whom quite fit into their environment, and the people who shaped their childhoods.

As a queer kid in the Appalachian foothills, My Ántonia was the first novel I had read in which I saw myself. Not the daydream version of myself– the superhero figure on a grand adventure that I wanted to see myself in– but the real me. The scared kid who didn’t quite fit in and didn’t yet know how to navigate the world. Importantly, by the novel’s end, I saw a young man returning home and finding peace with his past, which was something I thought was not in the cards for me.

Within a few weeks, we had concluded our lessons on My Ántonia and moved on to the next book, but, emotionally, I hadn’t moved on.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m heading to college. I’ve decided (to the chagrin of my mother) to pursue a degree in English primarily because of My Ántonia, and my desire to better understand why that particular novel stuck with me so acutely. An extracurricular reader, I dove into Cather’s oeuvre– starting with her other “prairie novels” that preceded My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark.

By that point, I was hooked. Cather’s crystalline prose captivated me. Her writing is so simple, so direct, yet so disciplined. Every word and every sentence carries with it a kind of intentionality that is hard to replicate. I’ve tried. In my studies, one of the exercises we would do to learn more about how different authors’ writing styles functioned was to attempt to write several paragraphs in a manner that emulated the author.

Hemingway? Easy. Faulkner? Difficult but doable. Fitzgerald? No problem.

But Cather? Not. A. Chance.

I’m biased, but she wrote circles around her contemporaries.

Editor’s note: I should disclose that I am starting this draft from Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town Willa lived in as a child, as I attend the Cather Foundation’s Spring Conference. I am VERY biased to the point that I will venture into rural Nebraska to hang out with academics for the weekend just to tour her childhood home, purchase an excess of books about her work, and attend lectures.

As my love affair with Willa deepened, I ventured into her letters, essays, and critical works, as well as the study of her life as an author. There is so much that writers and artists can learn from Cather and her unique ability to paint living landscapes, sneak in sly jokes, and construct mythological narratives about the American identity1.

Cather wasn’t just a writer, though. She was something of an acolyte of the arts. She held artistic expression atop a pedestal, and consistently sought to elevate it. A lifelong fan of opera and theatre, there are multimodal influences across her work.

She also spent considerable time reflecting on the nature of art and its value in society. Throughout her novels, short stories, essays, and letters, Cather continually refined her artistic philosophy, which fueled her desire to create breathtaking works throughout her lifetime.

Willa Cather: On the Novel and the Purpose of Art

In Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, she tells the story of Thea Kronborg. In the novel, Thea grows up in a small town in Colorado, but she has a love of singing that leads her away from home in pursuit of her art.

Part IV of the novel– “The Ancient People”– sees Thea in the area outside Flagstaff, Arizona, to rest and refocus. In one particularly striking scene, she is bathing in a pool of water in a canyon and as she emerges from the water, she’s overcome with a sense of recognition of the beauty of the land around her and a shard of broken pottery that she has found, and realizes the connection between art, life, and nature.

Cather writes,

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

Within this paragraph, we see Cather giving form to her burgeoning perspective as an artist in which art is a byproduct of the human desire to hold on to the fleeting, ever-changing nature of life.

And Cather held writing as an art in incredibly high regard. In several of her essays, she draws a sharp line between novels that are written purely to entertain and novels that aim to possess some artistic merit. By today’s standards, her stance likely would have been considered elitist. She quibbled with publishers over the tiniest details of how her books were presented. She vehemently resisted having her work printed as paperbacks rather than hardcovers. She was meticulous about every little detail.

Throughout her career, she seems to wrestle with the purpose of art. In some of her earlier letters and essays, she rejects mass market novels as futile and largely a waste of time. In these letters, she she upholds “artistic” novels as those that do something new. One of her most well-known essays, “The Novel Démeublé,” the very pointedly states,

In any discussion of the novel, one must make it clear whether one is talking about the novel as a form of amusement, or as a form of art; since they serve very different purposes and in very different ways. […] The novel manufactured to entertain great multitudes of people must be considered exactly like a cheap soap or a cheap perfume, or cheap furniture. Fine quality is a distinct disadvantage in articles made for great numbers of people who do not want quality but quantity, who do not want a thing that "wears," but who want change,—a succession of new things that are quickly threadbare and can be lightly thrown away. […] Amusement is one thing; enjoyment of art is another.

She then goes on to distinguish that the type of writer behind each type of novel is vastly different, with writers who create for art having a distinct characteristic in which they can distinguish what is meaningful and what needs to be reflected within fiction. In contrast, writers who serve a mass audience simply observe and recount the world before them without the critical eye of distinguishing what is deserving of capture.

Cather penned “The Novel Démeublé” in 1922, but it wasn’t her first time wrestling with the question of the function of art and the artist. Her 1920 short story, “Coming, Aphrodite!,” for example, follows the story of a man named Don Hedger, a young avant-garde painter who lives in a shabby apartment in Washington Square, New York City.

Hedger is curmudgeonly. He’s set in his ways. Like Cather, he desires to create art that he deems meaningful and culturally important.

But then a new neighbor moves in. The beautiful Eden Bowers, a singer, enters the apartment next door and almost right away she casts a long shadow over Hedger’s life. She is depicted as a free spirit. Like the goddess whose name lends itself to the story’s title, Eden Bowers is the embodiment of passion and desire, and is depicted equally in terms of beauty and vulgerness, especially as her behavior is concerned. Hedger is completely awestruck by his neighbor, including one rather infamous scene where he is watching her through a hole in the wall and “Hedger's fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon” in a scene so beautifully euphemistic, you can almost miss that it’s describing self-pleasure.

As Hedger and Bowers grow closer to each other, their ideological divide becomes clear. Bowers wants to entertain. She wants to be on stage singing for the masses, and she doesn’t understand how Hedger wouldn’t want the same for his paintings. She pleads with him to consider creating work like that of Burton Ives, a fictional, commercially successful painter. Hedger is deeply offended that she would want him to lower himself and his artistry to the level of a painter like Ives, who he views as something of a lucky simpleton who does work that “any painter in New York” could do.

It’s considered bad criticism to assume that the events of a story are drawn directly from an author’s life (the biographical phallacy, it’s called), but writers write what they know, and the rift between Hedger and Bowers could be seen as Cather wrestling with her own ideas about art and making a living as an artist.

By the end of “Coming, Aphrodite!” both Bowers and Hedger are successes by their own definitions and in their own fields. Bowers headlines shows across Europe (ooh la la), and Hedger is featured in major exhibitions as his work finds an audience with which it resonates and is understood. The two weren’t able to make it as lovers, but they were able to make it as artists, almost as if Cather is suggesting that both avenues of art are viable, albeit irreconcilable.

Part of Cather’s resistance to mass market novels came from her experience publishing her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. After it was published, she began to distance herself from it. She reflected in essays and letters that Alexander’s Bridge encapsulated what was en vogue at the time, not what she found interesting. Her next novel, O Pioneers, on the other hand, told a story that decidedly wasn’t en vogue. It was provincial and utilized elements of the prior generation’s regionalist literature, set in quiet midwestern prairies. It didn’t feature the upper class, big cities, or political intrigue. And yet, it spoke deeply to a generation of readers who found themselves on the cusp of a changing culture, who craved a simpler American myth to believe in, and who were captivated by Cather’s crystal clear prose, powerful women, and gripping storytelling.

O Pioneers solidified itself as a work of art, and her subsequent novels carried on its tradition.

In the end, Cather’s work and her desire to be seen as a serious artist rather than someone with mass market appeal are far less important to her than her desire to create.

She wrote in a letter to her childhood friend, Muriel Gere, while living in Pittsburgh, “There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.”

And in later letters, she conveyed that writing was the one activity that deeply interested her:

The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning's work.

Subscribe now

William Cather, MD | Cather’s Queer Identity and Challenges to the Gender Binary

Cather’s inclusion in this newsletter during Pride Month is no coincidence, either.

While I don’t know that Cather ever used the term lesbian to describe herself, the Birkenstock fits. The Subaru key turns. The KD Lang ticket is sold. The U-Haul is rented. The softball game is scheduled.

I could continue, but I don’t want my love of lesbians and their stereotypical jokes to dip into disrespectful territory.

Born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873, Cather spent much of her childhood pushing back against gender norms and expectations. Up to about the age of fifteen, she had ambitions of being a surgeon, a role typically held by men at that time, and styled herself in men’s clothes, used masculine pronouns, and referred to herself as “William Cather, MD.”

Some modern critics and scholars speculate that Cather may have identified as non-binary or gender non-conforming in today’s vernacular if it had been available to her. However, as Willa wrote explicitly about being a woman later in her life, and we can only speculate that she may have been non-binary, I will continue to refer to her as a woman and use she/her pronouns to describe her.

Regardless of where she may have fallen on the spectrum of gender identity, one thing we know for certain about Cather is that she maintained relationships with several women over the course of her life, notably including Louise Pound, an American folklorist and poet, and Edith Lewis, a magazine editor.

While Cather wasn’t an out-and-proud lesbian by modern standards, she was fairly forthcoming about her sexuality with those in her close circle. One of my favorite Cather quotes comes from a letter to her childhood friend Ellen Gere, sister of Muriel Gere who I’ve previously mentioned, in which Cather describes her life in Pittsburgh while working for Home Monthly, a women’s magazine. In the letter, she talks about a performer she’s become friends with who has captivated her attention, she writes, “And right near it is the Casino theatre and my old friend Pauline Hall plays there all next week. I foresee alas, that I will not go to the library on matinee afternoons but will slip across to the Casino to look upon Pauline's glorious anatomy once again. The old Nick is in me Neddy, its no use talking.”

She’s essentially saying that her friends or the religious family she’s living with in Pittsburgh may think the devil (old Nick) is possessing her, but she doesn’t care– she’s going to spend her time lusting over Pauline Hall while she can rather than spending her time in the library.

What I find so fascinating about Cather and how her sexuality plays out in her work has to do with the female characters she creates. Figures like Ántonia (from My Ántonia) and Alexandra Bergson (from O Pioneers!) buck feminine expectations, and are often contrasted against women who fit more traditional gender roles without being pitted against them. They work the land, they wear trousers, they do “men’s work” on their respective farms and take on provider and protector roles for their families. By embodying the pioneer spirit, they can embody their womanhood while also transcending traditional gender expectations simultaneously.

Like the women of her fiction, Cather didn’t let traditional gender roles define or limit her. During her time as a writer for Home Monthly, Cather penned an article under the pen name Helen DeLay in which she stated, “The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. ”

Photo by Anna Dickson on Unsplash

Happy Pride Month! All month long, I’ll be taking a look at some of the LGBTQ+ artists who have had a profound impact on my understanding of and appreciation for literature, art, and culture, and discussing the ongoing impact and legacy of their work.

We’re going to kick off our Pride series by talking about one of my favorite artists: Keith Haring.

Haring has been one of my favorite artists for a while. His work is whimsical and manages to take very rudimentary shapes and elevate them into something engaging and evocative.

Radiant Baby from Icons series, 1990

Silence = Death, 1989

National Coming Out Day, 1989

I’ve recently been reading his collected journals – Keith Haring Journals from Penguin Classics– and have developed a newfound appreciation for him as a person, an artist, and a borderline philosopher. That’s what I want to spend some time unpacking. How, over the course of his career, did he make sense of and live out his artistic ethos?

“Art is for Everybody” | Unpacking Haring’s Art Philosophy

Haring’s collected journals span from 1977 to 1989, covering his late teens and early twenties, as he hitchhiked to Grateful Dead shows, the peak of his career starting in his mid-twenties, and the last months of his life, when he used his platform to continue raising awareness about the AIDS crisis.

Even in his preliminary entries, while he’s still in his early twenties, it’s clear that Keith is already developing his sense of taste as an artist, but also his understanding of why he creates art and what it means to create art.

One of the first entries, a long piece Haring wrote while seated in Washington Square Park, includes a long discussion about change being the default state for the human condition. Haring reflects that most people choose to ignore the constant state of change they are undergoing – from the unseen changes of cellular division to aging to the fluctuation of moods from day to day – and seek to resist change that they cannot control.

In acknowledging that everything and everyone is constantly changing, Haring remarks:

There is a point, I’m sure, where the modern man can confront this reality, question it, explore it, and live with it and actually become part of it and lead a much more comfortable life. To live in harmony with an idea. To live in harmony with an uncontrollable reality that we are subject to whether we choose it or not. There is no choice except the choice of how to deal with it.

Keith Haring, 1978

From there, he goes on to state that he keeps writing because it is how he grapples with and makes sense of his constantly shifting reality. He then dovetails his own written exploration of how he makes sense of the world into a conversation about the function of visual art, and how it intersects with language and understanding.

Poetic sentences that make no sense might as well be poems.

Keith Haring thinks in poems.

Keith Haring paints poems.

Poems do not necessarily need words.

Words do not necessarily make poems.

In painting, words are present in the form of images. Paintings can be poems if they are read as words instead of images. “Images that represent words.” Egyptian Art/ hieroglyphics/pictograms/Symbolism. Words as imagery.

Can imagery exist (communicate) in the form of words?

Foreign languages, undeciphered alphabets can be beautiful, can express without a knowledge of the menaing of the words.

Keith Haring, 1978

While still very early in his career, it’s interesting that he’s already reflecting on hieroglyphics and pictograms as a means of conveying poetry or meaning through imagery. Throughout his career, his work is often compared to hieroglyphics and functions as pictograms, suggesting that his desire to make sense of the world through reflection and capture visual poetry is a key factor in his work.

In the same journal entry, he goes on to pen what I consider to be the first draft of his personal art philosophy. Throughout this long section (which I won’t reproduce in its entirety here due to the length), Haring rejects the idea that the goal of art should be to be easily understood or concretely defined, and asserts that it is in an individual finding meaning within a piece of art that gives it its value. Here is where the ethos of Haring’s oeuvre starts to take shape. He writes:

Definition can be the most dangerous, destructive tool the artist can use when he is making art for a society of individuals.

Definition is not necessary.

Definition defeats itself and its goals by defining them.

The public has a right to art.

The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a “self-proclaimed artist” to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.

Art is for everybody. To think that they– the public– do not appreciate art because they don’t understand it, and to continue to make art that they don’t understand and therefore become aliented from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn’t understand or appreicate art and is thriving in this “self-proclaimed knowledge of art” that is actually bullshit.

[…]

Art is life. Life is art. The importance of both is over-exaggerated as well as misunderstood.

[…]

Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.

There are no set answers, only questions.

Keith Haring, 1978

In later journal entries, Haring looks back at his previous writings and reflects a sense of youthful eagerness and naivety in what he had written, but he underscores that he doesn’t think he was incorrect in entries such as this one from 1978. If he shows signs of being critical of his earlier entries, it’s purely a matter of style and refinement, not a shift in ethos. A 1986 entry written from Montreux, Switzerland, in fact, preserves his sentiment about art and meaning as he reflects, “The need to separate ourselves and connect ourselves to our environment (world) is a primary need of all human beings. Art becomes the way we define our existence as human beings.”

This sentiment—that art is how we define our existence as people—is the undercurrent behind his mission and creative ethos: “Art is for everybody.”

Art is for everybody because we all spend our lives wrestling with questions about meaning, purpose, and identity, and art is the medium through which we can create a sense of understanding across these facets of our personhood.

Untitled, 1987. One of Haring’s signature figures is reaching through his head and his heart, often thought to signify Haring’s belief that humanity struggles to align its thinking self with its feeling self, but in the spirit of not defining art… we’ll just say that’s one interpretation 😉 

Haring’s Work as a Societal Mirror

As with all art, Haring’s work didn’t just reflect his whims and, clearly, wasn’t simply a matter of personal aesthetics.

Throughout Haring’s journals, he reflects discomfort, fear, and a desire to find hope amidst the challenges facing society at that time. Themes of nuclear proliferation, the crack epidemic, South African apartheid, and the impact of technological advancement all crop up across his work.

Untitled, 1982

Untitled, 1980

Crack is Wack, 1986

Free South Africa, 1985

Untitled, 1983

Haring’s efforts to make his work accessible and visible to the public meant that he was often working on large murals and other displays that were present in public spaces. While many of his paintings were exhibited in galleries, it was essential to Haring that his work not be reserved for a wealthy elite, despite the fact that by the early and mid-1980s, he could have been an exclusive, high-ticket creator due to his status and popularity as an artist.

As Haring made sense of the world and wrestled with his fears about the future through his artwork, he shared it with the public. A prolific artist who frequently engaged in creating chalk drawings on the walls of the New York City subway system, crafting large murals and public installations, and in the form of t-shirts and other consumer goods through his Pop Shop, Haring invited others in to reflect on their own awareness and level of comfort with the issues and topics that he deeply cared about.

The AIDS Epidemic

Ignorance = Fear, 1989

Among the issues facing society during Haring’s life, the AIDS crisis was what Haring was perhaps the most vocal about, or at least about which he was the most prolifically engaged in processing his feelings through his artwork.

With the Reagan administration refusing to intervene in matters of public health concerning gay people, and often outright mocking the deaths of gay men who died from AIDS-related complications, the 1980s were a harrowing time for queer people. The CDC conservatively estimates that between 1981 and 1990, AIDS killed at least 100,777 people in the United States. The actual number may be significantly higher as AIDS care and research were intentionally underfunded (and often openly blocked by the Reagan administration), and the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS forced many not to seek medical care.

Safe Sex, painting, 1985

In 1987, Haring discovered he was HIV positive, and by the fall of 1988, he received an AIDS diagnosis. He experienced breathing difficulties and noticed a purple spot on his leg. With many of his friends having already succumbed to the disease, he was taken aback that he hadn't fallen ill sooner.

Even after his diagnosis, however, Haring continued to create. In 1988, one of the motifs that crops up in his work represents a demonic sperm cell, which seems to represent the insidious spread of HIV and its ability to infiltrate all facets of one’s life.

Untitled, 1988

Untitled, 1988

Haring passed away from AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990. He was 31 years old.

Despite the regrettable shortness of his life, Haring’s work continues to influence artists today. KAWS, Banksy, and Jonas Fisch continue Haring’s legacy of making bold, inquisitive works in public places, and his works of advocacy – especially the Silence = Violence slogan and the motifs with the inverted pink triangle– continue to adorn protest signs, hats, and t-shirts on the frontlines of today’s fight for equality.

Almost prophetically, in 1978, a few years before the first cases of AIDS were reported to the CDC, Haring wrote the following in his journal, seemingly aware of the fact that he would leave the world without finishing everything he set out to do:

It seems that artists are never ready to die. Their lives are stopped before their ideas are completed. Matisse making new discoveries up until the time he could hardle see, using scissors, creating ideas that sparked new ideas until death interrupted. Every true artist leaves unresolved statements, interrupted searches. There may be significant discoveries, seemingly exhausted possibilities, but there is always a new idea that results from these discoveries.

I am not a beginning.

I am not an end.

I am a link in a chain.

The strength of which depends on my own contributions, as well as the contributions of those before and after me.

Their lives are stopped before their ideas are completed is a notion that we see echoes of in 1989, shortly before Haring’s passing. With his AIDS diagnosis and deteriorating health, Haring started a painting that he knew he would never finish. Unlike the artists who ran out of time to finish their discoveries that he opined about in 1978, by 1989 Haring was staring his mortality in the eyes and wrestled with coming to terms with his inevitable passing.

Unfinished, painting, 1989

In his painting, typically referred to as The Unfinished Painting or just Unfinished, Haring paints the upper left quadrant in his signature geometric style, but lets wet paint run down the canvas and leaves the rest of it blank.

For most of his career, Haring would start by painting the border of his work before getting started, but in Unfinished, he doesn’t. He paints the top corner without completing the border, almost as if he is accepting that he can’t continue on as “normal.”

The paint that drips down the front of the painting resembles tears, whether those of us as viewers, Haring as the artist, or the painting itself, mourning what will never be.

The part of the painting that he created maintains his usual sense of joy, whimsy, and playfulness that his work embodies. It invites us into an intimate moment with the artwork, prompting us to consider what could have been.

It’s a call-to-action. It asks us to mourn the loss of the thousands who died during the AIDS crisis without having the opportunity to “complete” themselves and realize their dreams, their potential, their hopes. It also reminds us why Pride and advocacy are so important; countless deaths could have been avoided if public health and fairness were prioritized over stigma and petty political bickering.

Haring’s life, his art, and his journals are also a call-to-action to keep creating. To be curious. To engage with art in our search for meaning. To acknowledge those who came before us and to set the stage for those coming after us. To hold up a mirror in equal measure to our fears and our hopes.

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Blake Reichenbach

Like our Content? Support Inkwell Insights

It’s easy to support Inkwell Insights. Simply click on an ad to one of our sponsors, purchase a book through one of our links, or just share the newsletter with your friends.

Daily News for Curious Minds

Be the smartest person in the room by reading 1440! Dive into 1440, where 4 million Americans find their daily, fact-based news fix. We navigate through 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive roundup from every corner of the internet – politics, global events, business, and culture, all in a quick, 5-minute newsletter. It's completely free and devoid of bias or political influence, ensuring you get the facts straight. Subscribe to 1440 today.

Sign up now!

I am currently on vacation, spending a few days in my happy place.

The view from my Airbnb’s balcony, looking out over the valley of Saanen.

I first visited Switzerland in 2023 when my employer offered me the opportunity to take a paid sabbatical and recharge. Being fond of mountains and of Swiss descent (in case the surname “Reichenbach” didn’t give anything away), I decided to make a pilgrimage to my family’s ancestral hometown, Saanen.

Throughout that first trip, I ricocheted across Switzerland by train. My journey started in Lugano, then Zurich, then Luzern, then Bern. For each city I stayed in, I made a point to go out and hike through the region or visit local museums.

On this trip, I happen to be here at a time of the year when the weather isn’t particularly conducive to hiking. It’s rainy and cool, which means that for this visit, I will double down on visiting more museums. Today, after I hit send on this newsletter, I’ll be off to the Museum Der Landschaft Saanen, and tomorrow will be the Alimentarium, or food museum.

Aside: there’s an oft-used expression in Switzerland along the lines of “Es gibt kein schlechtes Wetter, nur schlechte Kleidung,” which means "There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” If I were a good Swiss boy, I’d just put on my cool, rainy weather clothing and go hiking anyway. Perhaps a few generations in the US have made my bloodline too weak– I’d prefer to stay dry.

It turns out, spending time in these museums and art galleries may actually be the right choice for my health.

The Culture-Health Connection

According to the World Health Organization,

Research by the WHO Regional Office for Europe has shown that the use of artistic media in health care and in communities can have a variety of benefits for health outcomes. They can be used to communicate valuable messages across cultures and political divides, help affected communities understand the risks of certain diseases or behaviours and provide ways for affected populations to process and learn from their individual and collective experience to improve their wellbeing among other benefits.

https://www.who.int/initiatives/arts-and-health

While communicating across various divides, helping people understand risk, and learning from experiences are all valuable and important, I found the WHO’s summary of art, culture, and health to be a bit… underwhelming.

These outcomes, while valuable, are also somewhat ephemeral. Perhaps I’ve been corrupted by living in the US for so long, but I find that they’re somewhat easy to dismiss as idealistic rather than tangible, measurable outcomes that express the benefits of art for society.

But I had a gut feeling that there was something there, so I dug a little bit deeper.

A 2024 study coming out of the UK found that interacting with “culture and heritage” (which encompasses visiting museums, viewing art, listening to music, watching plays or musicals, playing an instrument, or engaging in creating art) has a significant impact on individuals that:

• Reduced costs to the NHS

• Increased productivity at work

• Improved quality of life.

Between the reduced NHS costs and increased productivity, the study conservatively estimates that the arts and heritage contribute a whopping £8 billion to the UK economy.

Why?

Well, it turns out that engaging with art and culture as little as once a month positively impacts mood and dopamine levels, improves prosocial behaviors, and even reduces one’s sense of chronic pain.

These same outcomes are why art therapy has become a powerful tool in treating conditions as varied as dementia and PTSD. Engaging with art in this way helps patients process emotions, spend time with others, and reduce anxiety, all of which contribute to living a longer, happier life.

David Foster Wallace Brought me Down this Rabbit Hole

As I’ve been traveling, I’ve been finishing up David Lipsky’s book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.

In it, Lipsky is asking Wallace about his “TV addiction” and what value he gets from watching television versus his perceived frustrations with watching too much tv or movies.

As part of a lengthy response, Wallace replies in part:

Like, at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonne get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is alreight. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest

He then goes on to clarify that he thinks each generation has different struggles or forces that require the generation to “grow up.” For his grandparents, it was WWII; for his generation, it would be learning to do things that aren’t quick, convenient, and commodified.

This got me thinking about another book on my TBR pile, Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsaman and Ivy Ross. It’s now bumped up to the top of that queue, and I’ll dive in once I’m back home and nearer my overstuffed bookshelves.

See Some Art. Your Body Will Thank You.

Fun fact: as I walk around Saanen, I see the name Reichenbach on everything. While uncommon in the US, in this part of Switzerland, it’s nearly as common as a name like “Smith” back home. If I visit the local church’s cemetery, it would seem that half of those interred within are distant cousins.

It’s time for me to go pop into my first museum of the day, and I would encourage you to do similarly. Find a museum or art gallery you can stop by. Go buy a sketch book and some good pencils. Enroll in an art class!

Or, just sit down and start writing. Doctor’s orders.

Dear readers,

Have you noticed an odd trend in your inbox recently in which you receive an email with the subject line “test,” followed a few hours later by another one with a subject line like “oops! We made a mistake” or something similar?

The first time it happened, I assumed it was an honest mistake. I’ve worked on marketing email systems for a few years and know how finicky they can be.

However, it continued to happen… and it persists across various brands.

By the time I had received four or five emails like this, it finally clicked that they were probably not test emails, and they had likely not been sent by accident. They were perhaps actually clickbait campaigns that played on recipients’ voyeuristic desires to see something they weren’t supposed to; a transparent attempt at optimizing email open rates via subtle manipulation.

And that got me thinking. I couldn’t help but ask myself how the concept of “writing for the Internet” has influenced the writing craft.

Throughout the history of the Internet, we’ve seen tools proliferate that started with pure intentions and evolved into money-printing behemoths that have, essentially, dumbed us down.

The Early Internet

Maybe the heading of this section is a little misleading. The early internet that emerged in the late 1960s was primarily a military research and intelligence tool, called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

What I want to talk about instead is the early version of the modern internet, which was born in 1989-1990 at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee’s work introduced the concept of the Internet as a series of interlinked hypertext documents in which documents could be accessed by any nodes (i.e., your massive family computer that had its own room if you were wealthy enough to have a computer in the early nineties)on the network.

The technical jargon is actually pretty simple.

Hypertext refers to information in a digital document that can be clicked or otherwise navigated to go to another document. For example, if you’re reading this post, see a link, and click it… that’s hypertext in action.

If you’ve ever seen HTTP or HTTPS in a web address, that’s something we’ve inherited from how the early internet formed. They stand for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, respectively. (Let’s ignore the fact that it accounts for the “t” in hypertext to be capitalized even though that’s incorrect. It’s still a valid acronym.)

With the early internet, it became possible, essentially for the first time in technological history, for a wide audience to publish documents that reference other documents and can be accessed by nearly anybody, creating a powerful tool for sharing knowledge.

And feelings.

The Golden Era of Blogging

On the heels of hypertext, a few key technological advancements burst onto the scene.

First, there was the emergence of fiber optic cables as a way to facilitate access to the internet. If you were an internet user in the 90s and early 2000s, you know that the internet infrastructure available to us was terribly slow… but it was still light years faster than anything that existed before.

Secondly, computer scientists developed tools that made it easier for the layperson to publish content to the internet. You didn’t have to be a computer engineer or developer to put basic content online.

That’s what enabled the first bloggers to emerge onto the scene.

To cite the most authoritative data source on our modern hypertext highways, Wikipedia:

From June 14, 1993, Mosaic Communications Corporation maintained their "What's New"^[12] list of new websites, updated daily and archived monthly. The page was accessible by a special "What's New" button in the Mosaic web browser.

In November 1993 Ranjit Bhatnagar started writing about interesting sites, pages and discussion groups he found on the internet, as well as some personal information, on his website Moonmilk, arranging them chronologically in a special section called Ranjit's HTTP Playground.^[13] Other early pioneers of blogging, such as Justin Hall, credit him with being an inspiration.^[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Inspired by people like Bhatnagar and his blog, Moonmilk, more and more bloggers emerged online to showcase their interests, perspectives, and values. Many early blogs were written as personal blogs on platforms like Open Diary and Live Journal, where individuals could treat the internet as their personal diary, sharing assorted thoughts and reflections as they would the confines of their personal notebooks.

But other blogs were more focused. Politics, philosophy, religion, science, arts, sports, and technology all became popular topics for people to write about. By 2002, blogging was already having a real impact when bloggers brought scrutiny and attention to comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. He had made comments in honor of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond that implied he was in support of Thurmond’s racial segregation policies. Mainstream media outlets paid his comments a passing glance at most, but independent bloggers sounded the alarm, ultimately leading to Lott stepping down as Senate Majority Leader.

By then, blogs were firmly on the scene and starting to compete with print media, challenging newspapers and magazines as the primary news and editorial outlets.

Also in 2002, as bloggers brought a senator to his knees, another advancement entered the blogging arena that, twenty years later (spoiler) would be its death knell: ad networks.

In the Spring of 2002, a platform known as Blogads made it possible for bloggers to integrate ads onto their websites and begin earning revenue. The following year, Google, in a period of rapid growth leading up to their IPO, launched AdSense, which allowed bloggers to tap into its already sprawling AdWords network.

While I don’t often quote Cindy Lauper in these newsletters, this time, it’s pertinent: money changes everything (yeah!) MONEYYYYYYYY CHAYN-JEZ EV-RY-THANG

And change the internet did. Especially in 2003 and 2004 when MySpace and Facebook rose to prominence, bringing a new realm of opportunity to our once-simple hypertext ecosystem.

Marketing Madness & the Attention Economy

In the early 2000s, blogs and social media were very different than they are today. But nurture and nature go hand-in-hand, and the DNA of today’s shitshow was already present, ready to mutate and takeover the Internet like cordyceps spores in an insect.

Expanded access to computers and other internet-connected devices in the 2000s, combined with the newfound ubiquity of ad networks, meant businesses had a massive new channel by which they could reach their target customers.

For social media platforms that prioritized acquiring new users and did not charge for memberships, ad networks were their primary option for making money. More users, plus more ads, plus more time on screen equals profits.

Bloggers were in a similar spot. Bloggers who ran ads on their content quickly realized that the more people who came to their blog, the more money they would make. Assinine personal reflections weren’t nearly as profitable as something exciting, enticing, enraging, engaging, or misleading. (Do you feel misled that I ended that alliterative list with a word beginning in a different letter? Sorry).

Whatever it took to get eyes on a page and keep them there to serve multiple ads became the norm.

For social media platforms, this meant increasing the rate at which paid ads surface on users’ timelines and optimizing algorithms to promote content that generated more engagement, which is usually polarizing and conflict-oriented content.

For blogs, clickbait, content length, SEO and became the keys to creating personal wealth. Here’s where we start to see the rise of things like “niche blogging” with its aggressive emphasis on affiliate marketing and intrusive ads, as well as the good ol’ recipe blogs, which bury (often very basic) recipes under paragraphs and paragraphs of content so that you have to scroll through several ads before getting to the part of the page you wanted to view.

“Writing for the Web’s” Golden Rules (that, Frankly, Make for Terrible Writing)

Writers and bloggers became content creators. Social media users became influencers. Entire jobs and economies developed around all the ways that you can make money on the internet (future newsletter about OnlyFans and writing copy for queerbaiting, maybe?).

As is always the case in massive economies, thought leaders emerged to define how to do it well, and rules emerged as the golden standard in the world of writing for the web.

Here are a few of the enduring rules of writing online. Bias alert: I hate them.

1. Don’t write above a 6th-grade reading level. Keep your writing simple and easy to read. You don’t want your audience to have to think.

2. Optimize for short attention spans.

3. Don’t assume readers will read all your content. Put your most important statements at the start of each paragraph and use clear headings so readers can skim your content.

4. Make sure there’s lots of whitespace—no long paragraphs. Again, people aren’t going to read them and will click away if they see big blocks of text.

Across the board, we’ve shifted our focus from creating valuable, interesting content to optimizing for creating simplistic, shallow content.

Writing for the internet (and for those of us who grew up reading writing optimized for the internet) has led to a reduction in our tolerance for nuance, deep reading, and contemplative reflection. I know very few people under the age of sixty who can stand in line at the grocery store for more than a few minutes without checking their phone and scrolling. Even for myself, it’s a habit I reach for without thinking. Frustratingly, I often find myself feeling like reading is a laborious, difficult process even though I used to devour books as a child.

In my writing, I’ve also struggled to get back to creating content that excites me. Look at that sentence. I even referred to it as creating content rather than telling stories. That’s a trained response, and I caught it almost as soon as I wrote it. Writing in a way that’s experimental or which seeks to capture emotion and sensation rather than tell a simplistic, direct narrative feels foreign (and I think I only do it well these days when under the influence of psychedelics, but that’s a story for another day).

As writers, artists, and patrons of the arts, we have to be intentional about cultivating a sense of taste. We have to be willing to think critically and go deep. Otherwise, we’re contributing to the dumbing down of the arts and the underappreciation for literacy that is already eroding at the critical thinking skills of today’s students.

If you’ve made it this far in the newsletter, good news. Your attention isn’t fragmented. Yet.

Happy reading,
Blake Reichenbach

For the longest time (okay, fine, the last two to three years), I’ve dreamed of starting an online writing community — a place where writers can network, engage in book clubs, find critique partners, and hold each other accountable for making progress.

As with anything I think about doing for that long, I gave it a go. And failed. After investing approximately $2,000 in personal investments across various software platforms and advertising, I successfully established a community and hosted my first book club…

Which, unfortunately, drew only a single attendee.

You live and you learn. I still want to sink my teeth into an online writing community one day, but perhaps that will come later. Entrepreneurship is a fickle mistress, indeed.

Unlike the community I attempted to launch, numerous thriving writing communities have emerged over the years, playing a significant role in shaping the literary landscape. Let’s discuss a few of those communities from the past and explore why they remain important today.

Table of Contents

• Howdy, dear word nerds,

  • The Bloomsbury Group

    • Notable Bloomsbury Writers and Their Works:

  • The Sisterhood

    • Notable Writers in The Sisterhood and their Works:

  • The Inklings

    • Notable Members of the Inklings and Their Works:

• Today’s Writing Communities | The Vanguard for Tom …

The Bloomsbury Group

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Virginia Woolf

The Bloomsbury Group emerged as an avant-garde collective of intellectuals in early 20th-century London, fundamentally reshaping modernist literary and artistic production through their radical experiments with form and content. What began as informal gatherings at the Gordon Square home of the Stephen siblings evolved into a powerful cultural force that challenged Victorian morality, embraced aesthetic innovation, and cultivated a distinctly intellectual approach to life and art.

Their contributions weren't merely literary—they created an entire ecosystem of critical thinking, one that valued "good conversation" and intellectual freedom above societal constraints.

Beyond their creative output, the Bloomsbury members embodied a proto-progressive lifestyle that continues to fascinate contemporary audiences—their complex romantic entanglements, their embrace of feminist and pacifist politics, and their cultivation of spaces where intellectual experimentation flourished.

Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness techniques, E.M. Forster's explorations of repressed desire, and Lytton Strachey's irreverent biographical approach all represented not just stylistic innovations but direct challenges to established cultural hierarchies. The group's legacy lives on not just in their individual works but in their collective demonstration that art and literature could function as vehicles for social criticism and personal liberation.

Notable Bloomsbury Writers and Their Works:

• Virginia Woolf – "To the Lighthouse," "Mrs. Dalloway," and the feminist manifesto "A Room of One's Own"

• E.M. Forster – "Howards End," "A Passage to India," and "Maurice" (published posthumously)

• Lytton Strachey – "Eminent Victorians," his genre-defying biographical work that punctured Victorian hagiography

• John Maynard Keynes – "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," merging economic theory with cultural criticism

• Leonard Woolf – "The Village in the Jungle" and his political works on imperialism

The Sisterhood

My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen . . . my mother and three or four of her friends. . . told stories. . .with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.

Paule Marshall

In 1977, amid the sharp fluorescence of emerging Black feminist thought, seventeen Black women writers gathered in the New York apartment of poet June Jordan. This literary summit would later crystallize into "The Sisterhood."

This collective—featuring literary giants such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde—was not just a casual meeting of minds, but a deliberate confrontation with the publishing industry's systemic barriers. They assembled not merely to commiserate but to strategize, mapping the terrain of a literary landscape that consistently devalued and marginalized Black women's voices despite their profound contributions to American letters.

The Sisterhood operated at the intersection of art and activism, embodying the notion that for Black women writers, the personal narrative is inevitably entangled with the political. Their conversations likely swung between granular publishing frustrations and expansive visions for literary liberation, creating an intellectual exchange that undoubtedly shaped their subsequent work.

This gathering represented a crucial moment of solidarity in which these writers acknowledged a shared struggle while affirming their artistic identities—a microcosm of the broader Black feminist movement that sought to carve out space for voices operating at the nexus of race and gender in American culture.

Notable Writers in The Sisterhood and their Works:

• Toni Morrison — Revolutionary novelist whose masterpiece "Beloved" (1987) explored the psychological trauma of slavery; won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993

• Alice Walker — Author of "The Color Purple" (1982), which depicted the lives of Black women in the rural South and introduced the concept of "womanism"

• Audre Lorde — Fierce poet and essayist whose collection "Sister Outsider" (1984) examined intersections of race, class, and sexuality

• Paule Marshall — Novelist whose work "Brown Girl, Brownstones" (1959) captured the Barbadian immigrant experience in Brooklyn

• Margo Jefferson — Cultural critic and memoirist who later won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism; wrote "Negroland" (2015)

• June Jordan — Passionate poet, essayist and activist whose work "Directed by Desire" showcased her commitment to progressive politics and personal voice

The Inklings

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

JRR Tolkien

The Inklings were a group of writers in Oxford who came together to create a space where they could blend myth, fantasy, and Christian ideas. They met in C.S. Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College and later at a pub called The Eagle and Child. This group served as a place to share and develop early versions of what would become important fantasy literature.

Their collective imagination reshaped 20th-century literature by legitimizing fantasy as a vehicle for serious philosophical and theological exploration—a direct challenge to the period's literary establishment that privileged realism and secular perspectives.

What distinguishes the Inklings' cultural impact is their remarkable staying power—their works have not simply endured but have expanded in influence, spawning film adaptations, academic departments, and entire literary genres. Through Middle-earth, Narnia, and their theological writings, they created immersive secondary worlds that continue to offer alternatives to technological materialism.

Their literary project—rescuing pre-modern ways of knowing through narrative—appears increasingly prescient as contemporary culture grapples with meaning in digital spaces. The Inklings remind us that fantasy is not mere escapism, but can function as a cultural critique and imaginative restoration—what Tolkien called "recovery," the renewed clarity with which we might see our primary world.

Notable Members of the Inklings and Their Works:

• J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion

• C.S. Lewis — The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Space Trilogy

• Charles Williams — All Hallows' Eve, War in Heaven, The Place of the Lion

• Owen Barfield — Saving the Appearances, Poetic Diction, History in English Words

• Lord David Cecil — The Stricken Deer, Early Victorian Novelists, Oxford literary scholar

• Nevill Coghill — Translator of The Canterbury Tales, literary scholar

Today’s Writing Communities | The Vanguard for Tomorrow’s Readers, Writers, and Thinkers

It’s relatively easy to see the impact of yesterday’s literary communities.

That’s the beauty of hindsight. We can more easily make sense of things that happened in the past because their outcomes have had time to play out.

When discussing groups like the Bloomsbury Group, the Sisterhood, or the Inklings, we have an innate sense of their value because we are familiar with the names and works of their members. Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and J.R.R. Tolkien loom large in the literary and cultural zeitgeist, and for good reason. Their works and their legacy, along with those of their fellow writing group members, have been inducted into the literary canon and have shaped the world of publishing for decades to come.

In our writing groups, things are still playing out. It’s harder to see the beauty and impact of our immediate surroundings precisely because we exist within the context of where we are. We didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree, you know?

We lose the forest for the trees. Or perhaps the trees for the forest. Whichever version of that saying makes the most sense here, apply it. My point is that time hasn’t yet revealed what will come of the communities we’re a part of now.

I don’t mean to suggest that we’re all in line to be the next CS Lewis or Audre Lorde. Hardly.

But, I do think it’s important to acknowledge the literary legacy we have inherited as today’s readers, writers, and art lovers. Literary communities have had such a profound impact on the canon and on culture because (and I’m not being melodramatic) magic happens when already sharp minds come together to sharpen each other.

One of my refrains across this newsletter and the accompanying podcast is that writing never exists in a vacuum. It is always responding to the culture in which it is created. A story will either reinforce or subvert dominant cultural norms. While I’m usually a man of nuance, this is something where there is no gray area. Writing subverts or it reinforces– always.

When we examine groups like the three discussed in this newsletter, it becomes clear that their artistic endeavors were consistently framed within the context of politics and culture.

In our current society, there are significant shifts away from intellectualism, thoughtful cultural critique, and engagement with art. The chronically online think that academic research is a waste of effort or that the villain’s actions in a book must represent an author’s personal nature. Booktokers and bloggers equate their personal taste with artistic merit, prioritizing the aesthetics of books over the value of literature. And, of course, there are revenue-maximizing efforts to more deeply commodify story with AI, giving wishful thinkers the illusion that they too can be authors and corporate executives the idea that they can cut out authors altogether, replacing them with a fleet of LLMs trained on previously published works.

This is why it is imperative that we continue to gather. When writers gather to hone their craft, challenge each other to deepen their skills, and form a life raft of mutual support amidst the shifting tides of tech, capital, and culture, we are embracing the legacy laid out for us by the writers whose shoulders we stand on.

Additionally, it puts us in a position to stand stalwart for those who come after us. We are engaging in a conversation that transcends genre, craft conventions, and even generations.

Art– especially literature, but hey, I’m biased– is a net good in the world. It teaches us about ourselves and our relationship to humanity. It instills empathy, helps us think critically, and improves our abilities to communicate with each other. If there’s anything we need more of now, it’s that.

Coming together as communities and breaking writing out of the box of being a solitary endeavor is how we advance not only our own skills and craft, but the field as a whole.

And who knows? Maybe you are the next Morrison, Tolkien, or Woolf.

Happy nerdery to us all,

Blake Reichenbach

One of Inkwell Insight’s upcoming podcast guests is CeCe Lyra, a literary agent with P.S. Literary.

If you’ve ever wanted to ask a literary agent a question about what they do, the business of publishing, or why query letters are so daunting to tackle, here is your chance!

Reply to this email with your questions before May 7th. Depending on the volume of subscriber questions we receive, I may not be able to ask all of them, but I will do my best to get to as many as possible.

The P.S. Literary Agency (PSLA), established in 2005, has been a leading advocate for creators for two decades.

Literary Agents: Business Partner, Publishing Gatekeeper, and More

I attended my first writing conference as a teenager, and one of the things that stood out to me at that time was that the other writers at the conference (most of whom were at least twice my age) treated the literary agents in attendance with something akin to a mix of fear, reverence, and fangirling.

Since people who had been writing longer than I had been alive viewed agents that way, I assumed I should do the same, and didn’t venture to speak to any of them during that weekend.

The majority of attendees held the literary agents in high regard, but I think there were a select few who were… indifferent.

What I came to realize is that for those seeking traditional publication, agents represent the first major hurdle in finding success. Many publishing houses review submissions from reputable agents only and will not accept submissions from writers directly. As such, having a literary agent supporting your work opens the door for you to be picked up, promoted, and distributed by a publishing house; this typically means larger advances and more favorable contract terms.

The trade-off, of course, is an industry standard of 15% of your earnings.

For writers who want total career and creative control and do not want to share their earnings, working with an agent loses its appeal. Plenty of writers prefer querying the select few publishers who accept unsolicited manuscript submissions or self-publishing. Should a publisher accept an unrepresented manuscript, it’s then on the writer to hire a lawyer for legal review of any contracts and to engage in contract negotiations, likely without someone experienced in the industry. If they go the self-publishing route, then the marketing and distribution of their title also falls squarely on their shoulders (one reason self-published titles rarely sell more than a few copies for authors who don’t already have a large, established audience).

Wanting to go the traditional publication route or self-representing each has its own pros and cons, so figuring out what’s right for you and your writing career deserves some space and self-reflection.

As long as you’re not that guy on Twitter who attacks agents and people seeking agents every chance he gets (he exists… if that’s you, please unsubscribe), either option could be good!

Other than Open Doors with More Publishers, What do Literary Agents do?

At the core of their role, literary agents are focused on helping writers succeed in the publishing industry. After all, the more successful the authors they represent are, the larger their 15% of the cut becomes.

This takes the form of several key functions:

1. Identify and represent talent. Agents read queries and pitches (so, so many) to find aspiring authors that resonate with them and who they believe have the potential to stand out in the publishing marketplace.

2. Manuscript assessment and development. As agents take on clients, they work with them to strengthen their manuscripts prior to shopping it around with publishing houses.

3. Pitch to publishers. Since most publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts from writers directly, as mentioned, agents become the mediators who can get your manuscript in front of the right acquisitions editor.

4. Liaising Between Authors and Publishers. As part of their relationship with publishers, agents act as intermediaries, managing communication, resolving disputes, and aligning the publisher’s vision with the author’s goals.

5. Negotiating Contracts. They negotiate publishing contracts on behalf of the author, including advances, royalties, and rights (such as foreign or film rights), ensuring fair compensation and favorable terms. They are familiar with boilerplate contracts, the typical offerings from publishing houses, and the implications of these terms for authors, enabling them to avoid unfavorable contract terms.

6. Career Management and Support. They maintain long-term relationships with authors, offer guidance, encouragement, and help manage publication schedules and payments

Often, writers look at sending out their query letters and getting signed with an agent as the end goal. But with everything that agents do for writers, it’s important to remember that they are your business partner as much as your opportunity to get in front of publishers. Finding an agent who you can see yourself working with long-term and who understands what you want out of your career it critical to your publishing success if you’re pursuing the trad pub route.

Send Me Your Questions for CeCe

Don’t forget to send me your questions about literary agents and the business of publishing before May 7th. You can reply to this email or leave a comment on it if viewing as a webpage.

You’ll be able to hear our interview with CeCe on the Inkwell Insights podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you treat your ears to literary goodness.

Have a fantastic week,

Blake Reichenbach

Anne Lamott

Table of Contents

• Meet Our Upcoming Podcast Guest, James Blatch

• Join Me for a Writing Sprint?

• One Fiction, One Nonfiction - Here Are a Few Book …

  • Let Me Hear From You

Meet Our Upcoming Podcast Guest, James Blatch

We will soon be recording an episode of the Inkwell Insights Podcast with author James Blatch.

If you’re unfamiliar with Blatch, here’s a snippet of his bio:

James Blatch is a former BBC Defence Reporter and a former BBFC Film Examiner. He reported for the BBC on the UK military from, among other places, HMS Invincible (Operation Desert Fox build up), Kuwait (Ali Al Salem allied air base), the Arctic Circle as well as covering the UK air offensive during the Kosovo Conflict in 1999.

During his time as a defence reporter he became the first civilian to twice fly in a BAe Harrier with 1 (Fighter) Squadron. He also enjoyed a trip in a Sepecat Jaguar with 41 Squadron to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the type’s introduction to RAF service.

Blatch works in publishing, teaching authors at learnselfpublishing.com and publishing writers at vinci-books.com. He is the cohost of the weekly podcast for authors indiewritersclub.com.

James’ background in journalism covering conflict zones infuses itself into his writing. We see the influence of his background in his books like The Final Flight, which is a Cold War era novel centered on veteran engineer Chris Milford, and the web of espionage, conflict, and politics he gets caught in.

For the interview with James, we’re going to devote a fair amount of time to the intersection of journalism and fiction and how the two styles of writing support each other… or how one makes the other difficult.

If you would like to ask a question about writing, James, or his work, reply to this newsletter or leave a comment on it on the web version.

Join Me for a Writing Sprint?

I’m going to be completely honest. My writing routine recently has been garbage. Absolute rubbish.

In the last two weeks, I think I’ve written a grand total of 150 words in my manuscript. I’ve been cranking out newsletter content, business emails, and scandalous text messages like a machine.

But my fiction? Neglected. Dejected. Lonely.

I’m currently working on a project that is centered on a fictionalized Appalachia and explores themes of childhood nostalgia, growing up queer in a rural community, and making peace with one’s roots.

Well, that, and… selling your soul to witches in the woods in exchange for magical powers, a shady mining operation that could end the world, and some major daddy issues.

Since it’s a story that I’m eager to finish a draft of, I’ve decided that I’m going to embark on a two-week writing sprint starting on the day this goes out. My goal is to add another 8,000 words to my manuscript. If I’m consistent, that’s about 570 words per day, which isn’t an insurmountable challenge by any means.

In my interview with Christina Lynch, the author of Pony Confidential (amazing book– check it out!), she talks a bit about having seasonality in her writing and how her obligations to her job outside of writing (and, you know, being a human adult with a million other responsibilities) sometimes means she has dry spells in her writing routine. Personally, I find a lot of comfort in being reminded that not all writers write every day, and that you can make progress and refine your craft even when your routine has an element of seasonality.

But, I also hope this writing sprint reenergizes me and helps me keep my fingers on the keyboard well past the two-week mark!

If you’d like to join me on this two-week creative sprint, please do. Let me know what you’re working on and what your goals are. It would be great for us to keep each other accountable.

One Fiction, One Nonfiction - Here Are a Few Book Recommendations from a Friend

Right now, I’m juggling two books. My poor nightstand is cluttered with books, pens, and adhesive flags. What can I say? I’m an engaged reader.

Both of the books I’m currently reading are wonderful in their own ways, and I wanted to share a bit about them.

First, I’m nearing the end of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Demon Copperhead won a Pulitzer, and for good reason. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s a spoiler-free blurb.

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Southern Appalachia is my neck of the woods, and reading this book has been both charming and challenging. The protagonist’s life is rough (and that’s an intentional understatement) in a way that can be stomach-churning at times. The book isn’t overly graphic, but to think about children in the situations he finds himself in is heartbreaking for anyone with common decency. What has made it a challenging read for me is that the backdrop of Kingsolver’s novel isn’t far off from where I come from. I see childhood classmates and cousins represented in a novel that looks unflinchingly in the face of rural poverty and the opioid epidemic. It hits close to home.

While I’ve had to read it slowly and take breaks, Demon Copperhead is a beautiful novel that I do recommend picking up. I don’t say this often, but Demon Copperhead also feels like an important novel to read, especially for folks in the United States. It handles part of our shared cultural history that is often overlooked and neglected.

As for my current nonfiction read, I just started reading Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. Lipsky, an accomplished writer in his own right, spent the last leg of David Foster Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest with him and recorded virtually everything.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself recounts conversations between Lipsky and Wallace as the former tries to encapsulate a portrait of the looming literary figure for a feature in Rolling Stones magazine.

Confession: I haven’t yet read Infinite Jest. It’s one of those “important” books I’ve heard of but never actually read. Reading through Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself has awoken a keen interest within me to change that. I’ve now got Infinite Jest sat atop my bookshelf like a literary cinderblock, the current capstone of my TBR pile.

But, Lipsky’s diligent record of their time together isn’t actually about Infinite Jest. It’s about the man behind the book and the culture that drove it into the spotlight and canon of American literature. Throughout, David Foster Wallace shares glimpses into his creative process and the artistic upheaval that comes with suddenly being considered a major success.

It’s interspersed with little gems like,

What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop…and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

David Foster Wallace, in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Wallace’s insights into the dynamics of being a writer are… interesting. I hesitate to say profound because that’s such an overused denotation these days, but perhaps there’s some profundity in there, too. I mostly approach it with curiosity, and I encourage you to do the same.

Let Me Hear From You

Before I sign off, I want to reiterate that I genuinely want to hear from you, dear subscribers. What are your thoughts on today’s newsletter? What are you currently reading? Want to join me for a writing sprint? You can reply to this newsletter to let me know!

Additionally, if you’re enjoying Inkwell Insights– the newsletter or the podcast– please share it with your friends, family, coworkers, nemises, cultish devotees, hairdresser, and whoever else you think may enjoy it. Growing our audience and connecting with more folks who appreciate art, literature, and culture would be a dream!

Have a lovely, nerdy week,

Blake Reichenbach

First, I have to try to arrange for guests to come onto the Inkwell Insights podcast so that I can tell you about them in the issue. Then, I must think through the topic I want to explore– will it be literary theory? Something of the moment in the news? A book review?

And then, of course, I must sit down and write. That’s probably the most time-consuming part. Unlike other things that I write day in and day out, the way I approach writing these newsletters is intentionally cumbersome. My goal is to force myself to capture a clear narrative and point of view while preserving my specific voice, and to do so while deliberately casting aside the trappings of writing for online readers that have dominated the industry for years (little “rules” like writing at a fifth grade reading level, having plenty of white space, using headers to break up your text so readers don’t actually have to read).

Given that my newsletters can be challenging to write and that most people who write and promote newsletters do so for the explicit purpose of monetization, a thought crossed my mind this past week. In my defense, I’ve had the flu and a temperature well over 102 degrees. But I did ask myself if it would be worth it to use AI to replicate my writing style and use that as an assistant to help me produce newsletter drafts faster.

No. The answer I arrived at is no. For a million reasons. We’ll touch on them in a moment.

I’ve mentioned this before– I think–  in a previous newsletter or on the podcast, but I’m not anti-AI. Artificial intelligence has many practical applications that are of net benefit to society. Its uses in medical imagery, for example, so far prove incredibly promising for detecting cancers faster. Businesses using retrieval-augmented generation to help customers get answers and solve problems faster can also be a big win. Even generative AI has applications in the workplace.

(Sidebar: I’m going in a different direction in this newsletter, so I’m not going to devote significant time to the environmental impact of AI here. I want that to have more space, so I’ll briefly it here and then reserve more time for it later. Here’s the TL;DR– AI uses a lot of computing power, which requires a lot of data centers, which require a lot of electricity and water. The carbon footprint of using ChatGPT to answer a query vs a traditional search engine search is like Taylor Swift taking a 20-minute private jet flight vs you or I flying in a sold-out economy.)

So, if I’m not against the use of AI in all cases, why do I not want to use it for my newsletter?

Well… the main reason I kept returning to is that I enjoy writing these newsletters. I enjoy writing difficult things because doing so makes me a better writer. I enjoy it because it allows me to leverage my unique background and love of literature.

There’s so much in this life that I have to do despite not enjoying it. Why would I start to outsource of the things I do enjoy to a machine that can’t experience the same satisfaction?

Also, this newsletter is a form of artistic expression for me. And art is not merely a product. It’s a process.

Even if I could crank out five or six of these a month with AI, what would be the actual benefit? I would have done nothing to hone my writing skills. I wouldn’t have needed to create space in my schedule to sit down and think deeply. There’d be no need for me to dig into industry trends and ask questions. There’d be newsletters to read, but I would get nothing out of it.

(There’s a good chance they’d be rather soulless, too. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but toot toot, honey, I put a little bit of my own zest into each of these.)

As I unpacked these thoughts, a few things were happening concurrently in the digital zeitgeist. And since I was trapped on my couch with the flu (miserable, sweaty, sore, and wishing I could be sedated), I had time to scroll, read, judge, and scroll some more.

Stolen Books Train Meta AI

On March 20th, 2025, The Atlantic published a piece titled “Search LibGen, the Pirated Book Database That Meta Used to Train AI.”

In it, journalist Alex Reisner covers the AI database of published books being used to train various AI models, most notably some of Meta’s recent AI applications. Users are able to search the database to see what titles appear, and many authors found themselves caught off guard to learn that their books had been included.

The reality for many contemporary writers is to assume that anything you publish online will be indexed by a search engine and consumed by an AI dataset. Many bloggers and website admins report that AI-based crawlers often disregard meta tags and robots.txt directives that intend to prevent the contents of a page from being crawled. Historically, these methods have been a way for writers and content creators to maintain a modicum of control over which parts of their content footprint are readily accessible to the public. As more crawlers completely disregard these directives, though, we’re left with fewer options, like relying on gating content and physical mediums.

However, what the LibGen expose revealed to many published authors was that even the world of traditional publishing and physical media wasn’t safe from ingestion. Their work was brought into the database without their prior awareness or consent– or the awareness or consent of their publishers.

Intellectual property law is a dumpster fire in the best of times. When burgeoning technologies backed by billions of dollars are involved, it’s even more of a mess.

There are numerous ongoing global lawsuits challenging the status quo and seeking to define what AI companies have a right to access and use, and whether or not training data should be considered a valid application of “fair use,” the term given to “transformative” usage of intellectual properties that are permitted under copyright law.

But the more significant issue at hand, in my opinion, is not whether intellectual property law clearly defines what is or isn’t allowed. The issue is whether or not the actions are ethical. What is ethical and what is legally allowed aren’t always fully aligned, especially considering how influential money is in widening the playing field for what large corporations are allowed to do.

For the writers whose work has been included in datasets like LibGen, the sense is that their work has been stolen. The hard work and dedication that goes into honing your craft well enough to produce a published work is significant, and to have a machine take the product of your labors and learn to spit out something that sounds vaguely like you is reductive, insulting, and disrespectful to the craft.

There’s a clear divorce between the product and the process of creating it. For AI companies leveraging sources like LibGen, books are nothing more than an output that can be trivialized as patterns and predictable sequences of words. For the authors behind the books, each work represents hours upon hours of hard labor, careful decision-making, thoughtfulness, and practice. For a machine to then take their creations and presume to be able to create "the same thing” is a clear misunderstanding of how art functions and what the “product” of art actually is.

What tech bros tout as a great democratizer of creativity is a flimsy sham. Spinning a story out of AI doesn’t make one a writer. To be a writer requires, well, writing. To write a story is to respond to the world around you– to inject your unique point of view into broader conversations. LLMs cannot do that. Even if you prompt them really well, they’re limited by their training data and the statistical median of stories that have been previously told. They can approximate a compelling tale but not craft something wholly unique.

Is Nothing Sacred? Hayao Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli “Trend”

Shortly in the wake of authors finding their work stolen and included in the LibGen database, a new AI trend emerged online.

Logging into Twitter and Facebook, one could find a deluge of AI-generated images approximating the style of acclaimed animator and Studio Ghibli founder, Hayao Miyazaki.

With new ChatGPT functionality, users were able to enter the popular chat interface, upload their photos, and prompt the ML model to recreate their image in the style of Studio Ghibli. And, it did.

Studio Ghibli is renowned for the care it takes in telling stories and producing its artwork. Films like Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away are revered worldwide for the quality of handcrafted artwork and ingenuity that brings them to life and their meaningful social commentary. These works of art have established themselves as classics. The cozy animation style gives each tale a sense of charm, and the stories are gripping and endearing.

It makes sense that there are people who would want to see themselves depicted in the style of their favorite artist, but the method of churning out these images with AI should raise concerns.

As quoted by The Independent,

[…] the trend also highlighted ethical concerns about artificial intelligence tools trained on copyrighted creative works and what that means for the future livelihoods of human artists, as well as ethical questions on the value of human creativity in a time increasingly shaped by algorithms.

Greg Evans, The Independent

Part of what makes Studio Ghibli’s art so meaningful is the care and craft that goes into creating it. When it is generated in bulk by an AI model, none of that care is present. You get something resembling the source material but entirely devoid of the same quality.

It’s like walking into a HomeGoods, buying a mass-produced piece of abstract art, and then claiming you own an original Pollock when you hang it on the wall. Maybe it’s a lovely work of art. Maybe it will brighten up your room. But it’s not valuable. It’s not unique. It’s not all that interesting.

Plus, we should be uncomfortable when there is a thematic chasm between something claiming to be art and its source material. Miyazaki, for example, spoke at length about environmentalism and exploitation. These are well-trodden motifs throughout Studio Ghibli’s films. To ignore the environmental impact of AI tools to churn out cheap reproductions with no artistic merit is antithetical to what his art stands for.

It’s akin to the (very real) Hunger Games x Shein collab. Shein is one of the largest purveyors of fast fashion, and has come under fire for its working conditions, unsafe products, and environmental impact. Like virtually all fast fashion brands, it exploits low income workers for the amusement and easy access to goods of wealthier audiences who are geographically separated from the conditions in which its goods are produced– namely, the United States.

The Hunger Games, meanwhile, is a dystopian narrative in which the residents of Panem’s capital pit children from the subserviant districts outside of the capital against each other in an annual fight to the death. They do this for their entertainment and efforts to suppress the population.

I doubt Suzanne Collins had anything to do with the collaboration (in my heart, I have to believe that she didn’t), but I can’t imagine anything less thematically appropriate for partnering with the Hunger Games than the exploitative practices of a company like Shein.

It’s Up to Us to Defend (Real) Art

Teachers at both the high school and university level are already lamenting the worsening literacy skills of young people in the classroom.

Chronically online tech bros would have you believe that they, too, can be authors without putting in the practice because they’ve engaged in some basic LLM prompting.

Artists are losing out on gigs to folks using generative tools to save money at the cost of coming up with anything unique and interesting.

Art is good for society. It is enduring. It is a means of challenging those in power, uplifting those outside of power, and pushing our cultural heritage to new heights.

For art to endure, we have to defend it. We have to constantly challenge ourselves to embrace new ideas, engage with new artists, and reject cheap impersonations of art that would dimish it from within the echo chamber of stolen training data.

Plus, we should remind AI absolutists that generating creative writing or digital art is a really dumb use case for AI. Of all the powerful things it can do, why would we want to approximate the part of the human experience in which the creation is as meaningful as the product?

I’ll conclude with a final quote from Hayao Miyakazi as he famously reacted to an AI-generated image of a lurching zombie for a video game:

“Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Hayao Miyazaki

Living in central Kentucky, LEX is a convenient airport for me to travel out of. It’s a short thirty-minute drive from my garage to the airport’s short-term parking lot, and since it’s a fairly small airport, parking isn’t too expensive.

The downside is that I rarely have direct flights to my final destination. Working for a Boston-based company, I need to head to New England a few times yearly. I think I’ve had a direct flight on one occasion, and that was only because I decided to make the two-hour drive to Cincinnati for a flight that took just a few minutes more than my drive had.

My point in all of this is that I’ve developed an interesting relationship with airplanes, airport lounges, and even the dreadful rows of uncomfortable pleather seats in airport terminals (do I sound too out of touch if I lament the fact that I can’t always await my flight in a cozy lounge?). I hate mindlessly scrolling on my phone, so when possible, I prefer to use my time between (and often during) flights to do something more rewarding. I’ll crank through a few work emails, open my bookstore and think about rebuilding it, decide my internet isn’t strong enough to handle Shopify development work, and then set my sights on whatever fiction project I’ve got brewing at that moment.

In my most recent travels– mainly as I was in the air between Detroit and Lexington– I opened my typewriter and started a new document.

(Aside: no, you’re not reading that wrong, and no, I’m not trying to be overly twee. I like to use the Freewrite Traveler to write on the go since it’s distraction-free and more manageable to balance on flimsy tray tables than my full-size Macbook.)

As my fingers lingered over the keys, I was unsure what to write. I have a fiction project I’ve been working on for a few months, but I’ve hit a wall with it and want to take a break. A big part of the plot hinges upon a romance that feels increasingly contrived the more I write about it. I’m not even into the second act of that manuscript and I feel ready to shred it and start again. Besides, I was tired and a little hungover and didn’t feel like putting in the mental energy to disentangle my protagonist’s sordid love life.

So, I decided to start something from scratch– something that would scratch the itch of wanting to write but which I wouldn’t have a mental and emotional quagmire to wade through as I wrote.

Simplicity was my goal, but I was still frozen. Having no clear path ahead, my wheels spun. With my manuscript I’ve been working on, at least I have a sense of where things are going, and I can manage to talk myself into powering through the horrible forced-romance era to get into something more substantive. With a blank document in front of me and nothing but a vibe rattling around in my fatigued skull, I was adrift and had no idea how to proceed.

As a kid and as a teenager, I used to open up a document and just start writing. Whatever came to me is what I put down. There was no planning or concern about coherence, character growth, or clear plot progression. I was able to regurgitate words onto the page until I felt I had reached the end– resulting on more than one occasion in manuscripts well over the 225-page mark.

Now that I’m old enough to have been called a DILF (a term I find both insulting and flattering), I must have outgrown some of that blind willingness to write by the seat of my pants. I’d like to think it’s because I know enough now to understand the mechanics of story and want to be thoughtful in approaching my craft. Maybe it’s just because I still hear Lisa Cron’s voice preaching the gospel of story each time I sit down and write.

Forgive me, Mother Cron, for I have sinned– I haven’t done a single Story Genius rewriting exercise for my current WIP.

But I think there’s something more than that. You see, these days, I view writing as a way to explore my worldview, and I want what I write to reflect who I am as a person and how I want to show up in the world. That puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of a hobby– of something I view as fun.

These days, I’m particularly invested in exploring themes of childhood, solitude, and secrecy, and I find myself repeatedly drawn to Appalachia and similar locales in my work. The burden of navigating life in the Appalachian foothills as a queer kid and always feeling like you’re teetering at the edge of losing everything is one that I have carried. As much as I want to play with that sense of a lost childhood in my writing for my own katharsis and hopefully a similar glint of recognition and healing my readers, at times, it feels a little too close to home.

I feel like I don’t yet have the skills to give the story I want to tell its due.

Part of this, I think, is compounded by the fact that I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which is one of the best and most beautifully constructed looks at life in Appalachia that I’ve ever come across. It’s also a punch in the gut and, at times, hard to read. Demon could be my cousin– he’s undoubtedly a dozen someones I grew up with.

And so I found myself staring unwisely at the fact that I am no Kingsolver and sure as hell won’t write as good of an Appalachian novel as Demon Copperhead.

Yet I wanted to write and refused to let a good two and a half hours of writing time (minus a few “just a water and a Biscoff, please” breaks) go to waste. Forcing myself to embrace my once-routine approach of just writing, I decided to abstract the setting a bit, opting for a rural mountainous region like a hybrid between Appalachia and the Alps. I’ve wanted to play with the motifs of sons and fathers misunderstanding each other and the enduring echoes of childhood friendships throughout life, so I set up the scene with a father who loses his temper when he drinks and a son who can’t seem to live up to what he thinks are his father’s expectations. In that plane ride, I made it to the point in the narrative where viewers have a vague understanding of the father and his connection to the family farm, and the son who is about to start school for the first time, where he’ll meet the boy who is to become his best friend.

Since arriving back home, I’ve been thinking about this story and where it’s going. Having grown up in the Bible belt, I remember feeling like the flames of Hell were always just about to consume me. Back when I prayed, I used to pray to God that I would die while still a child– still innocent– since my previous prayers of being made straight had gone unanswered and I didn’t want to pay the price of growing up gay. So, I took a look at this primordial soup of a story and played a game of what if?

• What if my protagonist is literally on the cusp of being consumed by the flames of the hells?

• What if my protagonist makes a deal with a devil (not the devil of Christian tradition because I have no interest in wading into those waters) because he thinks it’ll smooth things over with his dad, but it only makes things worse?

• What if that childhood friend that my protagonist is so afraid of losing does reject him because of who he becomes? Worse, what if my protagonist accidentally hurts his friend in an effort to prove himself worthy of love?

• What if my protagonist begs some god or the devil he made a deal with for release only to be told no?

The deeper I dive into these what-ifs, the more I feel like this story could have legs, and the more excited I am to continue diving into it.

At the same time, writing this story feels scary. Even with the layer of fantasy and the abstraction of setting, it feels very close to home and touches at that part of myself I don’t like looking at directly for too long. Still, it’s a story I want to tell– the story I know I need to work my way through if only for myself.

Caught in the tension between desperately wanting to write this story and feeling like it’s impossible to tell well, I find myself reflecting on The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (one of my all-time favorite novels) and Heather Love's essay “The Lure of Impossible Things” about Cather’s transition from a corporate office to the literary world and the parallels between her arc and Thea Kronborg, the heroine of The Song of the Lark.

In Love’s article, there is a beautiful excerpt of a letter Sarah Orne Jewett (another amazing late 19th and early 20th-century writer) wrote to Willa Cather. I’m going to include the excerpt in full because I think it’s worth representing in its entirety.

If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. This you are anxiously saying to yourself! but I am wondering how to get at the right conditions. I want you to be surer of your backgrounds, – you have your Nebraska life, – a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the “Bohemia” of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside … You must find a quiet place near the best companions… your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, and all Boehmia; the city, the country– in short, you must write to the human heart.

Sarah Orne Jewett, as quoted by Heather Love in “The Lure of Impossible Things,” found in A New Literary History of America (517-521)

Love then writes, "With a remarkable homing instinct, Jewett put her finger on Cather’s own ambivalence. Cather was caught up in the world of the office and at the same time she longed to escape– her ambition still drew her to ‘impossible things’ and to the dream of writing ‘to the human heart.’”

In referencing Cather being drawn to “impossible things,” Love is making a connection between Cather’s creative desires at this point in her life and a line of dialogue in The Song of the Lark in which Thea Kronborg is speaking with Dr. Archie, a friend and mentor figure, about what she wants in life.

In the scene, Dr. Archie confides in Thea that he wants to strike gold. Literally. He has invested in mines all over the Great Plains and out to the West, and his primary ambition is for these investments to pay off and grow his wealth. As part of this conversation,he asks Thea what it is she wants to get out of life. This comes at a point in the novel where Thea has already reflected in other situations that money is a limiting factor in what she believes she can do, so Dr. Archie asks if its money that she needs or is seeking out.

That’s when the two of them have this exchange:

Thea shrugged. "Oh, I can get along, in a little way." She looked intently out of the window at the arc street-lamp that was just beginning to sputter. "But it 's silly to live at all for little things," she added quietly. "Living 's too much trouble unless one can get something big out of it."

Dr. Archie rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, dropped his chin on his clasped hands and looked at her. "Living is no trouble for little people, believe me!" he exclaimed. "What do you want to get out of it?"

"Oh—so many things!" Thea shivered.

"But what? Money? You mentioned that. Well, you can make money, if you care about that more than anything else." He nodded prophetically above his interlacing fingers.

"But I don't. That 's only one thing. Anyhow, I couldn't if I did." She pulled her dress lower at the neck as if she were suffocating. "I only want impossible things," she said roughly. "The others don't interest me."

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Over the course of the novel, Thea relentlessly pursues impossible things through her pursuit of art and music. The impossibility she refers to in this passage could be thought of as a type of grandeur– the impossibility of a poor farm girl rising to stardom as an opera singer, which is something she successfully does by the end of the novel.

But I think it goes a bit beyond that. We also see Thea wrestling with what it means to be an artist and to create art throughout the novel, struggling to understand what it means to create and be devoted to her craft. In spite of this, it is when she is performing and dissolving in the music that she is most whole and satisfied.

I think the latter is the impossible things Thea refers to– to create and perform and find herself at one with the art she longs to create. The potency of art is a motif that runs throughout the novel and follows Thea through her childhood and into her adulthood. There’s a famously striking scene later in the novel when Thea is out west in Panther Canyon, Arizona and she goes out into the stream nearby to bathe.

Cather writes,

When Thea took her bath at the bottom of the canyon, in the sunny pool behind the screen of cottonwoods, she sometimes felt as if the water must have sovereign qualities, from having been the object of so much service and desire. That stream was the only living thing left of the drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries ago. In the rapid, restless heart of it, flowing swifter than the rest, there was a continuity of life that reached back into the old time. The glittering thread of current had a kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality, graceful and laughing. Thea's bath came to have a ceremonial gravity. The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic.

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

This revelation represents a sort of turning point for Thea in which her perspective on the role of art in her own life shifts, and it’s not long after this scene that she starts to have major breakthroughs in her career as a singer. In her acknowledgment of art as a means of capturing the fleeting beauty of life, it’s as if a superpower awakens within her, and she acknowledges what she can do when she sings.

To selfishly bring this back to my own manuscript woes, I find myself in a predicament where I, like Thea, long for impossible things– being able to tell the story I wish to tell with a sense of confidence and clarity. Yet, like in Jewett’s words to Cather, I haven’t yet allowed myself to see my experiences from the outside, and undervalue the perspective I can bring to my work. Jewett’s letter to Cather also serves as a forceful reminder to get out of my corporate bubble more and devote time to writing alongside others who challenge me to grow and do better.

It’s a theme that has often come up on the Inkwell Insights podcast. Just about every guest I have spoken to has highlighted the importance of finding a writing community to be a part of in some capacity, and the value that has for pushing you outside of your comfort zone and expanding your skillset as a writer. I shouldn’t be surprised that someone as perceptive and often ahead of her time as Sarah Orne Jewett would also echo these sentiments forward to me via Cather via Heather Love many decades later.

After all… what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?

1  Marcus, G., & Sollors, W. (2012). A new literary history of America. Harvard University Press.

‌

In the video, a young woman in her mid-twenties shares her morning routine. She’s in an upscale home with minimalist furniture. Everything is a soft, neutral palette– even her athleisure outfit– and carefully lit with warm lighting to make her appear effortless.

As she gets ready (despite already wearing a full face of clean girl makeup and not having a single fly-away in her high ponytail), we see her engaging with health and wellness concepts. She detoxes with celery juice and takes a shot of pure olive oil. Everything is organic and GMO-free. There are no scary chemicals anywhere. 

It’s a video that very clearly intends to encapsulate a specific aesthetic. There’s no real substance to it. A content creator is trying to project a high-income, unattainable image… the same thing we’ve seen online for a decade.

The most entertaining part of seeing the video in constant circulation is the commentary around it. I couldn’t begin to estimate how many variations of “all this organic BS and a face full of filler” I’ve seen in comments and retweets of the video.

But what does this video of pseudo-wellness and health fear exploitation have to do with writing, literature, and creativity?

Aesthetic Obsession Shapes Art

All art—there are no exceptions—exists within the context of the society that created it. It will subvert or reinforce dominant power structures, culture, and technology.

This is a natural byproduct of the unfortunate condition known as being human.

Because digital media is so pervasive today, one’s exposure to trend-seeking online media will shape how one creates art. The subject matter, the presentation, the tone, and many other variables are vulnerable to this influence, whether we like it or not.

I don’t mean to imply that watching viral videos like the one referenced above will result in today’s writers making their characters trendy with clean aesthetics and an obsession with wellness pseudoscience. Maybe they will, but that’s not a guaranteed outcome.

What I’m more interested in and expect will influence the current generation of artists is the pushback against hollow aesthetics.

People are increasingly bored with or frustrated with the current paradigm of influencers, social media, and the attention economy. This frustration manifests in several ways.

Think about how many books and think pieces have been written about shallow interactions and the attention economy. Tim Wu's Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Tim Fisher's Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains are all great examples.

We also see apps and hardware—Brick, Opal, SelfControl, Serene, and many more—designed to limit your time on non-productive websites by blocking them from your phone and computer. (I own a Brick device and pay an annual $99 to Opal; both were sound investments for me.) 

I think this is even reflected in the tendency for the digitally naive to share copy-and-paste scams on Facebook that claim to “reset the algorithm” so that they see more content from their friends and less from other sources. While these posts are (a) dumb and (b) don’t do anything but make you a target for scammers, they speak to many folks’ desires to reclaim a sense of authenticity in their online interactions.

The prominence of AI tools has accelerated the pace at which individuals are growing frustrated with online interactions. Constant attention being given to manufactured media, having to constantly question whether the “people” you’re interacting with online are real or not, and the churning out of mediocre content for no purpose other than to promote, promote, promote have had the unintended effect of leaving people feeling burnt out, stressed, and craving the ability to disconnect.

This collective shift toward technological frustration and distrust is already influencing art, and I suspect we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve Seen This Cycle Before - The Atomic Age and Post-Post Modernism

We’ve seen similar cycles in art and literature before. Consider the Atomic Age or Space Age and the way people’s interactions with technology shaped culture. Technology and culture were developing at seemingly unprecedented speeds. Between putting the first man on the moon and the threat of entire cities being annihilated, science and technology held equal potential for utopia and dystopia in the collective consciousness of the United States.

As such, we see art and architecture that projects itself as future-thinking and ideal– bright colors, organic and sweeping shapes– but also works of cultural significance that spoke to the shadow side of that technical advancement: books, films, essays, poetry, and more that sought to encapsulate the fear that such amazing technology would be used against people rather than for people, as it had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see George Orwell’s 1984 coming out in 1949, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon coming out in 1959.

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is an early example of post-nuclear apocalyptic fiction, and the first edition’s cover art captures the Atomic Age aesthetics that were dominant in paintings and other visual media.

Googie architecture is another example of Atomic Art embracing a more utopic technological progress vision. Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvilinear, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel, and neon. Googie was also characterized by Space Age designs symbolic of motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, diagrammatic atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs like "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif. These stylistic conventions represented American society's fascination with Space Age themes and marketing emphasis on futuristic designs.

One of the byproducts of the Atomic Age was the emergence of the postmodernist artistic era that really kicked off in the 1950s.

Postmodernism emerged after World War II as a reaction to modernism's failings, linked to totalitarianism or mainstream culture. Its traits appeared in the 1940s, especially in Jorge Luis Borges's work. Most scholars agree that postmodernism began competing with modernism in the late 1950s and dominated in the 1960s. Since then, it has influenced art, literature, film, and philosophy. Key features include ironic style play, skepticism towards the "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for virtuality over reality, and a motif of questioning what reality actually is, often resulting in characters having a splintered inner state that borders on schizophrenia.

Postmodernism is one of those eras of literature with so much gold in it, I want to devote an entire newsletter to it at some point. For now, though, I want to focus on the reaction to postmodernism.

Starting in the 1990s, we see an emerging trend of art and literature that is, in many ways, antithetical to the themes of postmodernism. Quiet novels. Stories of the mundane. A passive acceptance of the human condition as it is.

Rob Wijnberg of The Correspondent describes the post-postmodern condition by writing,

Such is the state of post-postmodern humans: aware of everything, willing to change nothing.

Our binoculars show the world and make us realise: our actions reach further than ever. But our shopping bag makes us forget about the injustice they cause, inducing economic amnesia: we are citizens second, consumers first. The potential sense of guilt, then, is defused by the nation state, which enables us to restrict our moral ties to the world to the borders of our homeland.

Rob Wijnberg, The Correspondent.

This sense of awareness plays out in the emergence of literary trends like New Sincerity, which was kicked off by David Foster Wallace in the 90s and carried into subsequent decades by writers like Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggars. Whereas postmodernism was primarily concerned with irony and questioning the nature of reality, post-postmodernism and New Sincerity seem to embrace a direct, penetrating gaze into that which is common.

David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” describes the emergence of post-postmodernism by writing,

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

New Sincerity is sometimes quiet and subtle, but at other times, it loudly lambasts the lens of irony and doubt that preceded it.

With each shift– from modernism to the Atomic Age, the Atomic Age to postmodernism, postmodernism to post-postmodernism and New Sincerity– the response to dominant cultural norms and the role of technology.

While post-postmodernism certainly has space within its conventions to accommodate critique of the current technological landscape and online culture, I suspect that in the coming years, we’ll see the pendulum swing back toward content drenched in irony and amplified depictions of technological upheaval.

One of the hallmarks of the Atomic Era was the latent fear that nuclear war would upend society and bring about an end to life as we know it in the United States. In no way do I want to compare our current technological shifts to the threat of nuclear war, but I do think that as AI and robotics become more advanced, we’re seeing a similar undercurrent of unease across large sections of society. As people fear economic impotence and increased disparity due to technology, the systems that create that sense of fear will come under the microscope of literature.

Influencers, doom scrollers, AI enthusiasts, crypto bros, MAGA, chronically online keyboard warriors, cancel culture, obnoxiously loud TERFs, medical misinformation spreaders, conspiracy theorists, and NFT diehards (who are somehow still around) are all rife with material for writers to work with. They’re practically bubbling over with behavioral tropes that beg to be lampooned in literature. 

In addition, we live in a political climate in which corruption is blatant and widespread in the US and beyond. Our highest-ranking politicians are figures who once would have been deemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously, yet here we are. A new type of billionaire class buoys corruption and despotic leaders in an ongoing cycle of exploitation and the pursuit of personal gain.

Between the absurdity of our political and economic reality, and the ludicrous paradigms that have formed online as a byproduct of this reality, I suspect that the earnestness of New Sincerity will give way to a reemergence of art and literature bordering on Dada.

To borrow from the Internet’s most reliable source and the current only textbook I have on Dada, Wikipedia, here’s a pretty solid overview of the movement:

Dada or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. […]

Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war. To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense, irrationality, and an anti-bourgeois sensibility. […] Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Art– including (and especially) literature– is always a response to the society in which it is created. It is going to subvert or reinforce dominant paradigms. As folks continue to get burnt out on the superficiality of social and digital media, our interactions become increasingly polarized, and global tensions rise, I expect that how artists respond to society will be somewhat in line with how Dadaists responded following WWI. I anticipate a rejection of the aestheticism of modern capitalism and the incorporation of nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois sensibilities across art and literature.

We’re most likely to see these works coming out from Indie publishers, as major publishers still try to placate economic headwinds and won’t see the current wave of Dada reflected in the literary canon for many years to come. ButI wouldn’t be surprised if we do see a few 21st-century Dadaists entering the mainstream and shaping cultural commentary quite soon.

Upcoming Inkwell Insights podcast guest Charlotte Wood published Stone Yard Devotional in 2023. In the years since, it’s a novel that has only grown more pertinent for readers.

Let’s take a peek at how the book’s publisher describes it.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.

Penguin Random House

In Stone Yard Devotional, Wood explores themes of solitude and the motif of retreating from modern life. What drew me to it– and to Wood– was the universal experience I’ve observed in myself, coworkers, and friends of feeling burnt out and wanting to retreat to a place of quiet and stillness. In recent months, one of my long-term coworkers left our employer and is taking time to ski, explore carpentry, and volunteer on a flower farm. His example caused me to step back and ask myself what I would like to do if I felt like I had the opportunity to take a hiatus from the corporate world for a time.

Unlike the protagonist of Stone Yard, I don’t foresee myself entering a monastery or joining a religious order. Instead, my pursuit of solitude would likely lead me to a horse farm or the mountains. 

In Conversation with Charlotte Wood

In the upcoming podcast episode with Charlotte Wood, we’ll be unpacking:

1. The themes of solitude and the desire to escape from modern life

2. What keeps Charlotte writing after seven novels and three nonfiction books

3. Creating character-driven stories that are rooted in inner turmoil

4. The lessons Charlotte has learned over her writing career

5. and more!

If you have a question for Charlotte or myself, reply to this newsletter or post it in the comments below.

If you are not familiar with the Inkwell Insights podcast, (a) I’m surprised you found this newsletter, and (b) let me give you a quick introduction.

The Inkwell Insights podcast is a haven for word nerds. I geek out about writing. Sometimes, I interview authors about their work and how they approach craft. Sometimes, I talk to industry professionals about how to stand out and write some damn good fiction. Other times, I talk about my own writing– you know, the usual trials and tribulations of aspiring to be a published novelist while also working a full-time job and caring for a very needy, deaf bulldog.

This newsletter follows a similar pattern. In weeks when I don’t publish a new episode of the podcast, I’ll publish an edition of the newsletter. It’s like a trade-off between your senses. Eyes some weeks, ears on others.

Just wait until I launch my cologne and hot sauce lines. Then, we can incorporate your senses of taste and smell into the mix, too. Touch can also come into play when I publish my book, and you get your grubby little paws on that glorious hardcover (I’m thinking deckled edges, baby!).

In the Inkwell Insights newsletter, you can expect to find:

• Writing exercises to help you hone your craft.

• Book reviews.

• Exclusive content from our podcast guests that is only accessible to newsletter subscribers.

• Deep dives into the mechanics of writing, including grammar, story structure, and other conventional wisdom.

We may occasionally venture away from these territories. For example, sometimes, I may want to shove a picture of my dog in front of your face, but that will be rare.

Sink your teeth into the following writing exercise as an amuse-bouche of what to expect from the newsletter moving forward.

Writing Exercise: Does Your Protagonist Have Daddy Issues? Plumbing Your Character’s Past to Understand their Present

One of the most challenging aspects when writing a novel is figuring out your protagonist’s motivation.

Stories are propelled forward by the tension between your protagonist’s goals or desires and the conflicts– internal, external, existential– that they must overcome to attain their goals.

If you aren’t sure what your character wants and why they want it, you’ll struggle to create a story that readers connect with and care about.

Even in genres like speculative fiction, where the external stakes may be as big and dramatic as an apocalypse or angry gods, every story has to be anchored in its characters.

As such, to create a book that readers will love and that you won’t dread writing, you need to know your characters deeply. That includes understanding what happened in their lives before your manuscript began.

"Without the past to anchor the present, everything will be neutral, and nothing will add up," Lisa Cron, author of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) explains. "And so it will come across as random to the reader."

Getting to the heart of a character's motivations—their misbeliefs, their emotional roadblocks, the specifics of how past experiences shape their perception of reality—is essential groundwork.

Exercise Instructions

For this writing exercise, which takes inspiration from Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, you’ll need to draft a scene from your character’s past that has shaped how they view the world. I intentionally want you to pick a moment that will not appear in your manuscript. Your character may reflect on it, but it shouldn’t be one that comes up in the prologue or a flashback.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Identify a misbelief that your protagonist possesses and write it down. Do they think love always results in pain? That wealth will solve their problems? That people are tools to be used?

   1. If you’re not sure what misbelief your character has yet, think about their flaws. Are they really sarcastic? Maybe they have a misbelief that it’s not safe to be genuine. Do they charge into situations without thinking? Maybe that indicates some kind of deep-seated fear that triggers their fight or flight response.

2. Once you’ve written down their misbelief, start to jot down ideas for events that may have happened in their past that either created or solidified this misbelief in their mind.

   1. Try to get three or four possibilities down on paper at this stage. You don’t need more than a sentence (or even a sentence fragment).
      

   2. Example: A character whose misbelief is that money will solve all of their problems might have a list of events like:

      1. Her mother used to say things like, “When mama makes it big, we’ll get out of here” when she was growing up.

      2. He once had to miss out on a school field trip to the planetarium because his dad drank the field trip money.

      3. After getting fired from his last job and taking on a temporary gig as a bus boy at the local dive bar, he ran into his childhood best friend, who grew up in a well-connected family and is now a hot-shot executive.

3. Pick one of the ideas that you came up with– whichever feels most interesting to you– and flesh it out into a scene. Focus on what your protagonist feels moment by moment. What did they go into the scene believing? How is that belief challenged, solidified, or changed by the events of the scene?

   1. For my current manuscript, which explores the queer experience of nostalgia as one of its key themes, my protagonist has the subconscious misbelief that he has to be perfect to be deserving of love and acceptance.
      
      So, when I did this exercise, I wrote about the first night he met his childhood best friend. His parents invited his friend’s parents over for dinner since they were new neighbors. In the scene, my protagonist (who was six at the time) makes a mistake that embarrasses his father and is swiftly and harshly punished.
      
      By the end of the scene, he feels like he has to walk on eggshells around his father, resents his mother for not protecting him, and admires his new friend, who tries to stand up for him and take the blame.
      
      (The scene I wrote for my own manuscript is also why I call this exercise Does Your Protagonist Have Daddy Issues?)

4. Once you’ve written your scene, reflect on how your character’s worldview will be shaped by that event in the future. Consider if there are scenes in your manuscript in which your character may be faced with a similar situation. Will they make different choices? Or, will the past repeat itself?

5. Tuck that scene away. I use the Notes section in Scrivener, but putting it in a Google Doc or whatever you prefer to use is also fine. Draw from it for inspiration as needed.

A First Issue Bonus: Meet Walker

As I wrap up this first edition of the Inkwell Insights newsletter, I wanted to introduce a recurring character to the newsletter: my dog.

I semi-jokingly said earlier that I might stray from the path of writing and share pictures of my dog. And hey, what’s a semi-joke without a semi-punchline?

Blake and Walker in the car– don’t worry, they were still in the parking lot and not driving yet. It’s not visible in the picture, but Walker is buckled in.

By subscribing to the Inkwell Insights podcast and newsletter, you make Walker and me a very happy duo.

Happy scribbles,

Blake