writing

I started using my writing career, not as a way to think through what was going on with me, but as a way to think through what was going on in the world and what we could do about it.

Writers, after all, are drawn to enclosure. Physical boundaries create social experiments, forced encounters, snow-globe microcosms of humanity’s virtues and ills.

Creative writing involves a deliberate rejection of practicality: To get into the right mood for writing requires short-circuiting our usual calculations of profit and loss, since there is nothing as gratuitous as a poem or story.

— Adam Kirsch in The New Republic

Writers serve the public as historians of vibe. What does it feel like to be here, now?