Authenticity
What does it mean for something to be 'authentic'?
Keely Adler and
Authenticity
learning how to write was very much like learning how to live: it all begins by listening to your inner voice and honoring it.
Living is as much a craft as is writing. There are rules and frameworks one can follow, but ultimately, one must define and cultivate one’s own style.
Living is as much a craft as is writing. There are rules and frameworks one can follow, but ultimately, one must define and cultivate one’s own style.
Ashley Zhang • Surrender control over your stories
I heard this quote from the writer Harold Brodkey who said, “I don’t understand privacy.” I’ve always understood privacy very well, but it’s like—what’s the point of taking your secrets to the grave, or even your banalities? We have this chance to let ourselves be known to other people, to fill out the web of humanity that we’ve been spreading for
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Funeral inspo. But also life inspiration. Hold space for inconveniences. Show up raw. Give space to the ugly versions of you so they can live and die.
The original poem this piece is built on is called ‘Tract’ - written by William Carlos William (whose work was a muse for the film Paterson).
Swept up in the Instagramization of the 2010s, the contemporary poetry world saw an exaltation of ‘honesty’ as an aesthetic priority. Poetry not as craft, but as ‘outlet,’ with the goal not of developing ourselves and enriching our understanding of the world, but of sitting more comfortably with how we already were and what we already believed.
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
‘Do not try to be the best. Be the only.’ It helps me believe in a positive-sum world—where my success does not hinge on the failure of others, and I am not in a rat-race.” — Nishant Jain
Caroline Cala Donofrio • The Best Advice I've Ever Heard
Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice to the process of experiencing it—how we feel, not what we’re feeling, making lucid that which usually eludes full expression.
