Celine Nguyen on Substack

The writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, on the value of writing and journaling: I had often thought that novelists and poets had a special advantage in learning how to live, their writings providing them with an instrument that most of us were denied. By being able to dramatize their own difficulties they were in a... See more

Celine Nguyen substack.com

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All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I... See more

Joan Didion • Joan Didion: Why I Write

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible…All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a “good” writer or a,“bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most

Issue 107: Commonplace journaling for mere mortals

Petya K. Grady petya.substack.com