Category: Reflections
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Incompleteness has been written about extensively in fields such as mathematics and philosophy. Sadly, it isn’t at all frequently discussed when it comes to volumes of complete works. A collection of complete works is supposed to be a group or set of literary, musical, artistic, or academic works created by a single author. Yet, one…
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Intellectualism is defined as “the exercise of the intellect at the expense of emotions.” In other words, it’s when you convince yourself you’re smart by ignoring your feelings. For the philosophers in the back, intellectualism is also a fancy cousin to rationalism, the belief that knowledge comes from pure reason, not from our muddled emotional…
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This is a response to a particularly thought-provoking newsletter from one of my favorite Substack writers. It’s part of her 28-day Writer’s Notebook challenge to find joy in writing again. This particular post from Collected Rejections gave me pause. Valorie Clark discusses the word “inevitability,” its roots, and the conclusion she comes to is that…
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There’s a dangerous myth that still lingers in how we teach, critique, and canonize writing, particularly with essays. It’s the idea that language is fixed, finalized, etched in stone. We’re taught in grammar school that the first draft must already point toward the final product. Then, revision is about perfection, not possibility. But the essay…
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin, Friendship Bracelets And Other Broken Promises This quote from my wife, Emily Pratt Slatin, is surgical. It names what so many queer femmes—especially lesbians and trans women—have lived: not a “choice” but a…
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Some time ago, while sifting through some old articles I wrote for the writing advice book I never bothered to finish, I stumbled across this passage that I decided to file away for later: “Write for you first, always. Just focus on getting your thoughts out of your head and onto a tangible medium. You…
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“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King Human beings are blessed with one sort of talent or another. Some are great at public speaking. Others are great at composing music. Still others are very good at writing essays;…
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The art of the essay is a practice much like medicine and law. There are no predefined rules besides conventions of grammar holding together your thoughtforms, what we call words. Every time we set ourselves to composing a work of writing, we must consider it as an experiment. Each time you set yourself to putting…