Mess, chaos, and disorganization in life and in our work can create anxiety, confusion, missed deadlines, outright rejection from others, and many other negative consequences. My mind, however, is naturally chaotic because I am—I learned, at age forty-six—neurodivergent. Finally! I know the reason why people called me “too sensitive” and “too literal” all my life. I know why my writing areas (yes, plural) tend to resemble exploded birds’ nests piled with books, pens, highlighters, empty teacups, sticky notes, nail clippers, ink sketches, random receipts, and dreaded paper stacks. Some of you, dear readers, might already have your noses turned up, ready to scoff and dismiss. Some of you, more gently, might relate. In whichever camp you fall, you may wonder how a person can function in such mess, and if we widen our view, in a world hostile to the way a messy brain works? 

I have learned to embrace that mess. 

A writing process can certainly settle into a routine. Or, embrace dynamism, evolution, correction, and contradiction as natural. Without those things, without chaos, would we even understand the value of order? 

Thus, instead of internalizing violent concepts like “kill your darlings,” we can employ order more gently, working with the chaos, using our particular strengths to our advantage.

The future I envision for creativity doesn’t construct parallels within us (in language or practice) of the world’s violence—using words and habits like force, gutting, cutting, sacrifice, competition, and comparison.

For my neurodivergent brain, that means pattern recognition. Yes, even in the mess, once my emotions ebb, I can see my writing habits clearly. In essays, I know I tend to use “but” often, rethinking what I said, contradicting a source, or arguing with myself. My awareness of that habit helps me look for the pattern and make corrections. Instead of beating myself up for still doing that after twenty-five years of writing, instead of internalizing useless insults, I can recognize revision exists to help us balance speed of thought with intended communication. 

Our perceived mistakes don’t diminish us. They call out our humanity, and invite us to keep practicing our discipline—not disciplining our practice. 

The future I envision for creativity doesn’t construct parallels within us (in language or practice) of the world’s violence—using words and habits like force, gutting, cutting, sacrifice, competition, and comparison. Critical thought and compassion are not separate. Used together, eschewing habits of thought that constrict and harm, they can help build a future writing process that invites us to uncover all of our messy, meandering ways of being and making and thinking with patience, acceptance, and respect. 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (2020). With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. She is a 2022 Disability Futures fellow and 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow.

I've been a fan of Nikki Wallschlaeger since her 2015 chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, in which Wallschlaeger combined photos of a Black Mattel doll named Julia with snippets of her own text for a series of not-quite-selfies. Julia's face, eternally inscrutable, taciturn, a little tired, neither smiling nor stern, combines with text like: "Wish you were a beer / instead of a colorblind mansplainer." You can view the full chapbook in Bloof's archives here. 

Her poetry captures what it's like to be tired out by having to be political simply because to put politics aside is not an option.

Wallschlaeger has, throughout her oeuvre, consistently balanced this personal-political thing better than any other contemporary poet I know, and the visual Julia poems are just one facet of that body of work. Her poetry captures what it's like to be tired out by having to be political simply because to put politics aside is not an option. This is perhaps something that Black women know more intimately than anyone else, and it's a space that I'm grateful to Wallschlaeger for illuminating. But her books are no political project; deeply personal, with the poems themselves often set in homes or houses (see her books Houses and Crawlspace as well as the upcoming Hold Your Own), in the spaces where the self is most comfortable or at least most honest. The political leaks in, in weird and obtrusive ways, because, even though as recently as the Obama presidency, we as a society tried to pretend that politics could be kept at an arm's reach, it was never really true. I feel like Wallschlaeger has inhabited this space in a way that other poets are just now beginning to understand how to do: the simultaneity of political exhaustion and radical love. 

There’s a found poem in her upcoming collection, Hold Your Own, called “Siri, I’m Getting Pulled Over by the Police.” Its text describes the function of a shortcut you can make an iPhone do, whereupon all incoming texts, calls, and other notifications will be turned off if the AI assistant hears the titular command. Wallschlaeger makes no pronouncements about it, simply informing; it’s followed by one called “Cute Animal Pics,” which offers up a bevy of the soft and cuddly, and ends with the line “I could just eat them all up.” These are the kinds of juxtapositions she confidently makes, because the world of her books is so big. A phone can be in a police scenario, or it can show you cute memes. There are poems in praise of calluses, rogue corn, and snakes mid-coitus. There are small observations of a world doing its thing. And there is self-love.

There are poems in praise of calluses, rogue corn, and snakes mid-coitus. There are small observations of a world doing its thing. And there is self-love.

I feel like these are the kinds of books we will be writing, reading, and seeing: books set in the realm of the personal, books that cohere in the private spheres, in the places of relaxation and pleasure and agency and joy, though the mineral deposits of politics and identity may trickle in through the old pipes of the bathtub in which we soak. We’ll be going back to books that are not boisterous statements or manifestos, even if they contain infinite quotable lines as Wallschlaeger’s do. In an age where it feels like every poetry volume has a tight thesis or project description to offer up, her collections feel both timeless in their ability to meander, and contemporary in their ability to confront ugly truths.

Niina Pollari is a poet and Finnish translator currently located in Western North Carolina. She is the author of the poetry collections Path of Totality (2022)and Dead Horse (2015), as well as the co-author of the split chapbook Total Mood Killer (2017).

At the beginning of 2023, I launched a Substack—regards, marcel—a two year “durational” “project” on Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Believe me. I’m rolling my eyes, too. My reasoning, though, was twofold: I wanted to read Search before I died, and I felt an urge to publish more regularly without having to rely on an increasingly precarious literary industry. As a freelancer, I figured if I was going to get paid shit and have to do all the promotional labor for myself, I might as well write about whatever the fuck I wanted to without the professional obligation of pitching, a practice I dread and, more, am very bad at. 

My motives were small and inward-looking at the outset, but I’ve been thinking lately about our (re)turn to newsletters, the surprising assemblages made possible there, and what freedoms are afforded to us as writers working within them. In a moment when seemingly-untouchable editors-in-chief and staffers are being shuffled off the cultural establishment’s mortal coil—simply for the crime of expressing solidarity with a people enduring genocide—there is a kind of complicated relief to be found in my own marginal relationship with these calcified apparatuses. I make my living bartending, which is also to say, I can sign nearly any open letter I please.

I make my living bartending, which is also to say, I can sign nearly any open letter I please.

It’s never been clearer that the institutions are failing us. But I’ve found myself heartened by the gathering collectivity of writers, artists, thinkers, and workers who have drawn lines in the sand and said: no more abdications, no more silence, no more capitulation to the rhetorical and ideological obfuscations ofthe “complex situation.” I am energized by our growing capacity, despite the shadow bans and the disinformation and the quicksand of political propaganda, to sidestep the gag orders altogether. 

It is beautiful to witness my friends recalibrating their newsletters—which are about all sorts of astonishing elsewheres—in order to stake their moral claims transparently, and in real time. Marlowe Granados has just passionately argued against submitting to “business as usual,” against our professional conditioning “to continue moving on and moving past.” Charlotte Shane’s brilliant, funny, and deeply moving weekly dispatches (on romance writing, YA, rape in fiction) have pivoted in recent weeks to meditations on making rigorous political action sustainable, resisting the immobilization of despair, and the preciousness of human and non-human life in the face offascistic dehumanization. I, too, wrote about Palestinian liberation in my most recent letter. I haven’t been able to think about much else.

There’s a kind of radical, punky, DIY feel in the air again.

It’s true the field is saturated, and atomization is sort of baked into the form. But people have been transforming their individual enterprises into makeshift dialogues, writerly group-chats, revolutionary magazines-in-miniature. There’s a kind of radical, punky, DIY feel in the air again. I’m old and open-eyed enough to admit I’ve never been a trend forecaster. I can only say what I hope, which is that the instability of our present inspires more of us to adapt and evolve, because the risks are swift and clear. The question stands: will you take them?

Jamie Hood is a poet, memoirist, and critic in Brooklyn. She's working on her second book.