Usually when I get stuck, it is because I’ve gone too long without being able to hear myself. Sometimes that happens because my job (the best part of it) requires me to listen closely to others—my students, my colleagues, my teachers—and it takes work, hard work, to turn one’s attention both inside and outside, to face at least two directions at once. Sometimes my mind is too full of the din of other people to know what I might think. Sometimes I can’t hear myself because I’m avoiding myself. Sometimes, simply, I get busy. I forget. So coming unstuck in my writing requires various strategies of self-amplification, ways of creating the conditions in which I can listen to me and not only to you. My strategies, alas, are only the ordinary ones, though I’m always on the hunt for more. For example, I talk to myself while driving or walking or making dinner. I read my drafts and my published poems out loud to remind myself what I sound like, have sounded like. I write sitting underneath my desk or in the closet, both of which grant some insulation from the pressing-in of the world. I try to meditate. I daydream. I read books I know I will find boring, so that my mind will wander. Certainly I am not the kind of person who writes every day—not the kind of person who can or wants to—but I do need to talk to myself (literally or otherwise) every single day, if ever I am to write.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism (Persea, 2025)