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I think what gets stronger for writers is an instinct for when something is or isn’t working and over time you acquire more techniques to fix it. And a lot of that is actually development as a reader.

Ariana Reines’s Wave of Blood has a beautiful insight about how poetry outlasts almost everything else human beings do or make.

Entering a sacred zone demands a shift in thinking. Some say the raised stone thresholds we step over to enter a temple are there to repel bad spirits, but a woman told me they are meant to humble us. In the past, people were forced to bow as they lifted their robes to cross.

I wish we had some architecture to humble us today. I’d like to see people... See more

It is plainly true that the most subversive act today would be to sit on the ground and weep with joy until you died; the Sage would embrace such a task with love.

for all the uncertainty in the world, people are largely humane to one another (certainly in person; especially in person (scale and abstraction are one of the things we don’t handle / process well and are the root of many contemporary issues))

In a way, I think that’s the only honest kind of art left. The kind no one asked for. The kind that resists explanation. The kind you make and tuck away, because you needed to make it. Because it meant something to you, even if it’s unclear what.

To me, this is the realest form of art there is. Art where it’s hard to even decipher why exactly someone is doing it, who exactly it is for, what exactly it means, and if it even has a meaning. If you want to ascribe any number of meanings to it, you can.

Have you ever read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud? He talks about how the magic of comics is in the space between panels—“the gutters.” What the reader puts together in the gutters, the narrative leap they make between frames, is the most powerful part of the medium. I thought a bit about how what I didn’t show between chapters could sustain... See more

I think jailbreaking from the middle distance is transformative and liberatory, and I don’t think it happens automatically by putting your phone away.