Hey writers! Everyone has their own style and yours is great. Some people’s writing is lush and descriptive and emotional, others are sparse and sleek and powerful, and others still are fast-paced and immediate and visceral. They all have their merits. No style is better than another. It’s all fine.

And! Not all of your pieces have to be one particular style either. Just because your last work was meandering or slow or heavy doesn’t mean your next can’t be sharp or quick or light. Don’t beat yourself up because you aren’t doing what you did in the last thing you wrote. That was a different piece, required a different mood. Do what works for you. Do what works for this story. Don’t worry about what others do or what you’ve done before.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles // Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War // Killing Eve, 2.03 – “The Hungry Caterpillar” // Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are // Florence + The Machine, “Hunger”

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds // Aimee Bender, “Devourings,” in xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (ed. Kate Bernheimer) // Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternate Endings // Kellie Wells, “The Girl, The Wolf, The Crone,” in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (ed. Kate Bernheimer) // Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales (“Introduction: Hansel and Gretel”) // Nina Coomes, “On Eve’s Temptation and the Monsters We Make of Hungry Women”

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body // Welcome to Night Vale, episode 102: “Love is a Shambling Thing” // Pablo Neruda, “Love Sonnet XI” from Cien Sonetos de Amor // Maurice Sendak, NPR Fresh Air interview (September 20, 2011)

May Swenson, “I’m One” // Kristiana Willsey, “Hunger Is the Beginning of Every Folktale” // Sam Sax, “On PrEP or on Prayer [‘when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis’]” // Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir // Anne Sexton, “Hansel and Gretel,” in Transformations // Emily Palermo, Love in the Time of Monsters // Margaret Atwood, “Eating Snake” // Anne Carson, “The Anthropology of Water” // Marjorie Liu, Monstress Volume 1: Awakening // Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood // Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 7.10 – “Bring on the Night”

Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals

my favorite lines from this article about poetry from students grades 3-6

i hope you write (i hope we both write)

hand in unedited hand

that's just what being a writer is like

Characters who fake their deaths, but you frame it like they're Orpheus.

They have to keep walking. They cannot look back. They cannot listen to the tears or the cries or the silence behind them.

They have to keep walking until they've made it through, because looking back will doom the ones they're trying to save.

a list of poems that make me feel tender:

forgive yourself again and again and again and again and again

love letters, victoria chang

i know we've all been warned that art is the biggest snitch but no one tells you that reading your own writing will make you realize things about yourself that you wouldn't confess to while being waterboarded

— R. Arnold

*frustrated possum noises*

Me writing fanfiction

musings on Spring

on graduation & parting ways

Night of the Woods: Chapter 3 / unknown / When We Were Young - Adele / We May Never Pass This Way (Again) - Seals and Crofts / Mikko Harvey, for M / John Berger, “Will it be a likeness?” from The Shape of a Pocket / forever - Charli XCX / Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters / nice2KnoU - All Time Low / @alisonzai

❝The Blue Lady arose in a spill of starlight, sublime and glowing and favored, with dragonflies in her hair and eyes blinking in each of her palms.❞ 

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