“Writing is a best friend. I meet up with it every day thinking, hi, I love you. This meeting up might look like journaling or reading but it’s writing. And I think of this like a no matter what thing. Then, sometimes, I am surprised by my resistance to writing. I realize it’s because of what’s on my mind: Will anyone notice? Will I be loved? Does anyone love me? And only when I find myself attached to any of these kinds of ideas over my friendship with writing am I imagining myself as ‘stuck.’ I love CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises. I believe in what they suggest, that if I move my body somewhere and take notes (like into a shopping mall parking lot and onto the median part with trees), I’ll come back to my gargantuan friendship with writing and forget, even just for a second, these fears.”
—Emerson Whitney, author of Heaven (McSweeney’s, 2020)
Photo credit: Paul Mpagi Sepuya