“Writers should never reveal their influences because the touches are never quite as subtle or as evocative as they might seem,” one of my current favorite writers wrote when Joan Didion died. I’m doing something meta here. You’re seeing my subconscious desire to recreate a piece on the subconscious desire to recreate.
I want to write like myself, and what I mean is: I want to write from the version of myself in conversation with the world around me. I wish I could bottle up my conversations with friends into an archive. One of my creative writing professors did something like this before the mobile phone. He put a tape recorder to his mouth and transcribed every word he spoke for a week. Some people do this on their Notes app with quote lists. Who knows which of my most crude, inarticulate, and articulate sentences have made it on somebody’s list.
One of the most frustrating catch-22s of writing is that I need to read to become a better writer, but I associate better writing with what I read, so writing better feels like following what I read. The only way out is in — to read so much that all these different voices swirl around me, and I’m in the eye of the storm looking at so much language that I can’t even begin to choose between it all.
I’m jealous of my friends’ ability to more eloquently articulate the core of our shared experiences. I want the razor-sharp identification of motivations and consequences the way Leslie Jamison does it. I want to stop saying “want” — I crave clarity, to write in complex sentences and language because they’re necessary, not elegant. I want to be a poet and a journalist and the rare kind of writer that mixes the two into beautiful narrative nonfiction. Writing relies on attunement between consumption and creation, and the crucial link is envy; to want to be great following all of the great ones prior.
These are the past few years of my favorite reads. These are what I return to when writer’s block feels so heavy in the air that I can’t muster up the muscle to start typing. These are poems about fish, essays about the Rizzler, and stories about scientific breakthroughs. These are each a crucial part of my voice, but you’ll never hear me say that.
ARCHIVES
Michael Lewis, The End
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/the-end/199112
Dogfish, Mary Oliver
https://www.poetseers.org/contemporary-poets/mary-oliver/mary-oliver-poems/dogfish/
Leslie Jamison, Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations
https://astra-mag.com/articles/dreamers-in-broad-daylight-ten-conversations/
Rafael Campo, Love Song for Love Songs
https://poets.org/poem/love-song-love-songs
Amia Srinivasan, Does anyone have the right to sex?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
Abby Sher, How to Talk to Kids About Death
Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas
Frank O’Hara, For Grace After a Party
https://allpoetry.com/For-Grace,-After-A-Party
Hayan Charara, Thinking American
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54263/thinking-american
Maggie Smith, Good Bones
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones
Langston Hughes, Life is Fine
https://poets.org/poem/life-fine
Charles Bock, What Happened When My Wife Died
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-happened-when-my-wife-died
Jason B. Rosenthal, My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/style/modern-love-my-wife-said-you-may-want-to-marry-me.html
Jericho Brown, Vaccinated
https://poets.org/poem/vaccinated
CJ Hauser, The Crane Wife
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/
Jean Garnett, Scenes from an Open Marriage
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/06/29/scenes-from-an-open-marriage/#more-160459
Louise Gluck, Anniversary
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30289
Betsy MacWhinney, Bringing a Daughter Back From the Brink With Poems
Jia Tolentino, The Age of Instagram Face
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-age-of-instagram-face
Melanie Thernstrom, The New Arranged Marriage
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/magazine/the-new-arranged-marriage.html
Brenda Shaughnessy, Gay Pride Weekend, S.F., 1992
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91498/gay-pride-weekend-sf-1992
Shayla Love, Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/09/ozempic-glp1-desire-buddhism/680088/
Mitch Therieau, Dream of Antonoffication
https://www.thedriftmag.com/dream-of-antonoffication/
Sheri Fink, The Deadly Choices at Memorial
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html
Daniel Engber, A Peer-Reviewed Portrait of Suffering
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/engineers-daughter-tbi-rehab/620172/
Jordana Jacobs, Our Kinder, Gentler, Nobody-Moves-Out Divorce
Lilly Jay, How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?
https://www.thecut.com/article/lilly-jay-divorce-essay-therapy.html?
Leslie Jamison, Giving Up The Ghost
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/giving-up-the-ghost/
Hanif Abdurraqib, On Summer Crushing
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/12/on-summer-crushing/#more-137178
Jay Caspian Kang, The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
Ian Frazier, Take the F
https://library.stlawu.edu/system/files/2021-02/take_the_f_frazier.pdf
Helen Holmes, “The Rizzler” and the Creeping Childishness of Pop Culture
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/magazine/the-rizzler-costco-guys.html
Caity Weaver, How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/magazine/quit-sugar.html
Annie Dillard and the Writing Life, Alexander Chee
https://themorningnews.org/article/annie-dillard-and-the-writing-life
David Means, Stories I Used to Write
https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/1527/stories-i-used-to-write-david-means?
Dan Vega, Norse Saga
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/143249/norse-saga
Aaron Long, First I Met my Children, Then My Girlfriend. They’re Related.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/style/modern-love-how-i-met-my-children.html
G. Calvocoressi, Hammond B3 Organ Cistern
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/hammond-b3-organ-cistern
Sarah Zhang, The Cystic Fibrosis Breakthrough that Changed Everything
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