It’s sometimes hard for me to swallow but the writing I’ve done the most and that I’m probably, gulp, best at is music blogging. Not the speedy firsties thing from the early 2010s but the fun-stupid (and sometimes ranty-serious) stuff that comes when having to churn and burn posts. It requires some semblance of play so that you do not lose your whole mind. For example, one time the grime artist Novelist tweeted he wanted to be in a girl-gang and I blogged about it as a palliative to endlessly posting SoundClouds and release announcement. Here is the closing graf:

Stupid! I loved it. I need to love something in a news editor role or I’ll go bananas.

When I was first offered my last news editor job, my mom was kinda on the fence about me taking it. The last time I had been a news editor, it coincided with, erm, me losing my whole mind. And yeah writing that is structured like this:

“So-and-So Announces New Project, Blah Blah Blah, On Such-and-Such Label”

[Los Angeles/Brooklyn/Berlin/London/Manchester] DJ/producer/curator/whatever So-and-So is set to release Blah Blah Blah on Nevuary 32 via Such-and-Such Label. It’s the follow up to their 2015 project, 2015 Project, which was put out by This Other Label and their debut release for Such-and-Such.

The first taste of Blah Blah Blah is “Song Title” etc. etc. etc.

is pretty artless. You get it done as fast as possible. When you’re good, it should take fifteen minutes or less from creating a new WordPress entry to posting the published blog on social media. I spit out that example from muscle memory.

Today I’m thinking a lot about what muscles we build as writers and how doing this kind of work — creating a highly ephemeral body of writing† that has limited impact in the first place — has rid me of certain modes of preciousness about my own writing. That my strongest muscle is the one that chops and tosses things, that knows everything can always be better or different and isn’t afraid to find out how.

We have huge capacities as writers to keep making new things and keep making things new. We are a hungry people but when we’re new, sometimes we fill our plate and let it get cold. But you’ve gotta eat it, babe. It’s nourishing and you’re not going to starve.

Probably-cloying metaphors aside, my message to you today is to just be fearless in your feelings about letting go. I don’t love the phrase “kill your darlings.” I actually think your real darlings are worth putting up a fight; everything else can be reshaped or refined or it can be refuse. Is there stuff you’re not super fond of but can’t let go because you did that? Let go. More will come, I promise. I promise that you can grow to a place where you’ll just write shit because it’s on your mind and you have to exorcise it, even if it just lives in a folder forever (see: essays I’ve written about Action Bronson’s popularity as a mechanism of upholding white supremacist patriarchy and what being carless in LA has taught me about how people talk about the unhoused population that no one but me will ever read).

You have so much in you. We all do.

Recs:

“Dead to Me” by Elle Nash (The Adroit Journal)

The first time I read this story was in workshop with Elle two springs ago. It’s such a beautiful and crushing look at motherhood, relationships, and loss. Elle’s work is unrelenting and she is so talented at writing characters who want not just to be perceived but received. She also recently published a story on Guernica called “Cat World” that I love for many reasons but, in particular, for how it deftly incorporates the internet, which is a creative thing I’m personally very interested in.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in conversation with Alexandra Kleeman at The New School on November 11

One of my most favorite short story writers will be chatting with one of my former professors at my alma mater in a few weeks and it’s going to be great. The dystopic stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s debut collection Friday Black are so reflective of our reality: there is satire about violence against and the murder of Black people in America, consumerism, abortion, and more. Kleeman is the author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine which does so many amazing things re: women and beauty but also obsession and control and how television borks our brains. See? How could this not be great? And the event is free and open to the public!

A wee programming note:

The November 11 letter will be about the book Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell which was published by Verso this fall. I wanted to give readers a heads up in case this book is of interest and you want to read before then :)

The paperback is currently sold out everywhere it seems but eBooks are also good!

Otherwise, find me at clairelobenfeld.com ♡

†imo, unless it’s, like, 2007-2009 The FADER, some of which I can still quote from memory, news posts are not writing, they’re typing.